


Perchance to Dream

by Like_a_Hurricane



Series: Pernicious Prompting [13]
Category: Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Extremis: for those who cyberpunk and want it in Marvel-land, Loki is a BAMF, M/M, Masters of Evil, Mentions of Kang the Conqueror, Mentions of various events from Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Norn Stones, Tony Stark is a BAMF, post-Extremis
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-03-16
Packaged: 2017-12-03 13:07:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/698584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Like_a_Hurricane/pseuds/Like_a_Hurricane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A force that the Avengers can neither identify or trace seems intent upon stealing the souls of earth's most powerful magic users, and even a few telepaths. One of the earliest casualties, and the only one whose soul managed to prove trackable and retrievable, is Loki Lie-Smith, now unconscious in the medical wing of Avengers tower. He may not wake up, or he might be faking his coma altogether––he's certainly fooled them before. Tony comes up with a rather radical solution that he keeps calling a Holo-deck, and comparing to the Matrix, but he seems to be the only one who thinks it's a good idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. What Dreams May Come

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rev](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rev/gifts).



> This was in response to a prompt I've put off for far too long, that I promised to [Rev](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Rev/pseuds/Rev), since she identified an obscure Transmetropolitan reference in _Dangerous Animals_. One-word/concept-prompt: "Virtual Reality". Well, recent playing around with various Extremis ideas led me to this. Sorry it's a bit late.
> 
> Also: This one is heavy on references to events from _Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes_ , which I've dumped into the MCU for funsies. Things like [Khang the Conqueror and his lover Ravonna](http://avengersearthsmightiestheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Kang_the_Conqueror), the [Masters of Evil](http://avengersearthsmightiestheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Masters_of_Evil), and [that time Loki used the Masters of Evil and Amora to almost take over the Odinforce and all the nine realms](http://avengersearthsmightiestheroes.wikia.com/wiki/A_Day_Unlike_Any_Other). Background knowledge of any of that isn't necessary, but it might clarify some stuff for anyone feeling particularly ambitious.

It was risky, and Tony knew it. That was why he waited until about midnight. Only the assassins might be stirring now, after the fairly sleepless week they’d all had, and by the time Tony strode down the halls and made his way down, down to the most high-security labs. Below the tower, down where they kept real danger as contained as they could, and not just for training purposes.

The med wing wasn’t usually where they kept it, though. Some augmentations had been made to try and make it more secure, but Tony knew they were likely in vain. If and (hopefully) when Loki did finish recovering, back to being a bit more his old self, he doubted the trickster would be inclined to stick around. Long experience had taught the Avengers that trying to hold onto him tended to be a futile exercise. Not even Asgard could manage it for long, anymore. They couldn’t even use a magic-dampening field, because the odds were that Loki’s recovering magic would be the only thing likely able to help him come back out of his current catatonic state.

Thor had once let on that he did secretly fear his brother a bit, after the Chitauri incident. Before then, the god of thunder had been able to believe that he might be capable of taking down his brother on his own––that when it came down to it, he was still the slightly more powerful of the two of them. Thor now knew that he could not have been more wrong. Loki’s mind and his magic put him closer in power to Odin than to Thor, and unless it suited his schemes, Loki would not hold back and concede or surrender to his adoptive brother. And when he held nothing back, he was not a force Thor could bring down on his own.

Odin knew it, too: that the only reason he remained more powerful than Loki was due to his advantages of age and experience, the Odinforce which protected all of Asgard and had not been kept so stable and well-tamed by any king before Odin, and Loki’s own impatience and chaotic nature. Tony recalled the one incident wherein Loki had taken the reigns of the Odinforce, after that mess with the Norn Stones, Amora, and the Masters of Evil, though. Thor had once explained that Odin’s control of the Odinforce was in fully embracing it as though it were a part of himself, which no others had done before––for such an embrasure required sacrifice of a certain degree of control over himself and his actions, for the good of Asgard. Loki had embraced it the same way, corrupted it even, and Tony had to wonder at times what he might have done with it if they hadn’t stopped him. _What if we’d let it burn?_ Morbid curiosity. That sort of thing was likely to get him in trouble.

So was this, though.

The machine Tony brought out was one he’d based on what he and Mr. Fantastic had built in order to try and communicate with a certain Princess Ravonna, who’d been trapped in a temporal/psychic limbo to keep her alive despite damages done to her timeline––damages that had brought her lover Kang to try and take over the earth a millennia or two earlier than before, to destroy Captain America and repair the time line. As a result, she was in a comatose out-of-joint state mentally and physically, not entirely dissimilar to Loki’s present one.

Tony’s new version had the more temporal components removed, creating what the inventor thought of fondly as an interface somewhere between The Matrix, and Star Trek’s Holo-deck. In theory, it’d give him a chance to have a little chat with the incapacitated god of mischief. So far it was limited in application, or he’d have something like it collecting the Last Will and Testament of many coma patients around the world. It needed someone with experience in lucid dreams, at the least. Someone who was used to connecting with complex computer interfaces with their minds would find it a cinch––as Tony had, after the whole Extremis incident––but aside from himself and people from distant future-timelines like Ravonna, there weren’t many on earth with such experience. It seemed a long-shot that Loki might manage it, but Doc Strange wasn’t exactly known for his _high-tech_ expertise so much as his psychic and mystical expertise, and had volunteered to test it with just his more mystical experience to draw on, and it had worked. Thor had started to get uneasy as soon as Strange compared it to dream-walking.

 

~~

 

“My brother is very experienced at dream-walking, and navigation of the astral plane. It would be a considerable risk to connect to his mind in such a fashion––he can affect persons in dreams in such a way that they will wake still feeling the effects. He has cut me in a dream, and I have woken bleeding.”

Doctor Strange nodded solemnly. “That is not unheard of, but it does require a great deal of power to accomplish. Your brother is hardly at his full strength. His soul has only just been returned to him, and I was not able to discern whether it was––undamaged, by its journey.”

Thor’s expression darkened again from concern to rage. “And you still do not know how it was torn from him?”

Strange shook his head. “Your brother is the most powerful mage I have ever had the misfortune to cross, Thor, and I do not make that judgement lightly. I cannot imagine how anyone managed to weaken him to such a degree. If it comes after me for my soul as it has for the others, I will be just as vulnerable, unless we can find out more about what to expect from it.”

“Amora suggested he might’ve lost a wager and got more comeuppance from Chthon than he anticipated,” Tony pointed out. “I got that much, between her taunting and constant hitting on you during that consultation, Thor. She said something about how the last she recalled seeing him, he was limping away from that little encounter and was quite rude to her. Someone caught him when he was already not in top form. So whoever it is targeting our telepaths and magic-users here on earth lately knew a bit about Loki and who his enemies are, as well as how to keep an eye out for him in a vulnerable state, which should narrow down our list of suspects at least a little.”

“I would suspect Chthon himself, if we had been able to find Scarlet Witch’s soul by now,” Strange offered. “She would be more useful to him keeping an eye on us in a mobile, conscious fashion rather than catatonic with all of the others at the Baxter Building.”

“How’d I get stuck with the only villain on our victim list anyhow?” Tony muttered.

“I thought you Avengers had more experience containing this particular trickster,” Strange mused.

“Only in theory. He’s a slippery bastard when he’s... not in a coma.” Tony prodded the trickster’s upper arm, frowning down at him, looking a little concerned despite himself. Loki still looked gaunt, still had dark circles around his eyes that had only faded a little once Strange had put his soul back. “Or faking a coma. I wouldn’t put it past him to be mostly-recovered and just biding his time, which he’d not be able to fully hide if confronted in my little holo-deck here.” He tapped the metal headband he still wore, with its assorted wires trailing back to the main machine itself, which reached out with similar tendrils to a slightly more intricate circlet in Strange’s hands.

“It was indeed very difficult to lie in that environment, I noticed. I couldn’t manage it myself. I could not manipulate it so easily as a dream, either,” Strange said.

“My brother has more experience than yourself, Doctor Strange, in such things,” Thor warned coolly. “Millennia more.”

“So what, we just sit and wait around here in awkward silence for him to wake up? Hell no,” Tony argued. “That will go one of two ways: he _won’t_ wake up, and we’ll never get any more information from him about who is behind this mess of stolen souls, or he _will_ wake up, and he’ll vanish his happy magical ass away at the first opportunity, and probably leave the tower full of mayhem in his wake the way he _always does_.”

“My brother has clearly not recovered. He has no spells about him, not even those which require the least exertion––no wards, no glamours––and those cuffs at his wrists-”

“Weren’t enough to hold him in Asgard last time!” Tony interrupted. “Were they?”

Thor scowled deeply. “He would destroy any who would dare tamper with his mind, Tony Stark.”

“It’s not tampering with his head. It’s knocking. He can join me in this little meeting-space, or he can happily stay in his own head.”

“And if he cannot be contained by your meeting-space, and wanders into your mind, Stark, what then?”

Tony smiled unpleasantly. “My mind is a dangerous place, too, these days. Ask the last telepath who tried to peek in there after the alterations I made with Extremis.”

The thunder god shook his head. “Do not underestimate Loki.”

“I finished making _that_ mistake a long time ago, Sparky. How about you?” It was a low blow, and he knew it. Just then, he hadn’t cared. He was getting impatient.

“I would not risk it myself, Stark,” the sorcerer warned.

“Well, to be fair, you’re a bit of a pansy. I mean, who wears a cape? Oh, sorry, wrong audience for that joke. I’m clearly the odd one out there, with this crowd.”

“I can see you’ve already ceased to take our concerns seriously,” Strange sighed.

“This is my serious-face,” Tony said blithely, pointing at his own grimly annoyed expression. “I _seriously_ think we can’t afford to let sleeping gods lie here. Especially given he might not even really be sleeping, for all we know. He’s faked coma-like vitals convincing even to your lot in Asgard before. Pardon me not trusting the apparent helplessness when we all know this guy is most dangerous when he _seems helpless_.”

Thor smiled faintly. “That is indeed something you share in common with him, at times, Tony.”

“So clearly I know what I’m talking about. Obviously.”

“We should discuss this more in the morning,” Strange said. “With input from the others, as well. Natasha and Black Panther both know a good deal about shielding their minds, and may have useful input before we proceed with this endeavor.”

Tony had muttered reluctant agreement at the time.

And then they had all put off that meeting for two days because more victims showed up and a few started to act a bit violently possessed, and once all that was cleared up for a while and things got quiet again, Tony lost patience and decided to take matters into his own hands.

 

~~

 

Now here he was, settling a sturdy, comfortable operating chair at the god of mischief’s bedside, and connecting up his machine. He had to lift Loki’s head slightly to get the apparatus on him, and realized it was closest he’d ever been to the trickster without violence involved. On Loki, the metal headband, woven with electrodes and nanomachinery as it was, looked like a circlet or crown more than anything else. With his long black hair only slightly mussed by the pillow, Loki looked like a prince from some cyberpunk alternate fairytale retelling. Sleeping beauty: technologically advanced trickster god edition. The Asgardian casual-wear Thor had replaced his usual armor with at some point only added to the impression: a loose green shirt of a slightly antiquated style, the threads at the collar loose enough to expose collarbones and a bit of bare chest. It was pretty distracting, actually, so the inventor focused on Loki’s face again, and found himself a little surprised.

Tony definitely didn’t recall noticing the very faint scars around Loki’s mouth before: they were not deep, and only stood out against his skin where the light caught them just enough to make clear they had a slightly more pearlescent sheen than the rest of his pale skin. They must be very old, then. Gods didn’t scar easy, either, so it must’ve been something pretty intense.

It didn’t take him long to work out that someone had sown Loki’s lips shut. He vaguely remembered reading something about that in the mythology somewhere, ages and ages ago. The thought was an uncomfortable one: caught between empathy for being painfully unable to speak, and uneasy understanding of some of Loki’s anger and bitterness on some level.

Thor was right about the pair of them being alike. More right than he realized, probably. Tony had known that for ages. Sometimes he was pretty sure Loki did, too. It showed in the way he focused his better banter on the mad inventor, when he fought the Avengers, and the sorts of tricks he sent Tony’s way; they were really _good_ tricks, that were often a major pain in the ass to deal with, but they were challenging in a way that most other villains just couldn’t match, and there was something Tony sort of appreciated about the artistry of them, that way.

Tony was pretty sure he himself just still looked like Iron Man Lite, in his own tiara. That was how bad this was: now he was thinking of the things as tiaras, which just wasn’t fair. “If you’re particularly good,” he said quietly, “maybe you’ll wake up to a kiss. Maybe even a surreptitious grope. Sound good?”

No answer. That alone made the inventor think maybe the trickster really was still out of it, which saddened him a bit, on some levels. Loki was more often delightfully responsive to bantering provocation.

It was hard to imagine this enemy, their god of lies and chaos and mischief, was really weakened and may not wake up again, especially after nearly a decade of crossing paths with him, and fighting against the trickster’s schemes. Even remembering how they’d found him, how bloodied and near-dead and inexplicably blue he’d looked when Thor dragged him into the lab, Tony couldn’t imagine Loki being––anything less than _Loki_ : mad and brilliant, bone-shatteringly strong, terrifying and beautiful like chaos at its best, always full of surprises and––well, always able to challenge even the likes of Tony Stark.

It bothered him a bit, when he realized that if they really had lost Loki this time, if somehow his soul had been damaged or something else had gone wrong after it was returned to him, that he’d really miss the rotten bastard.

Settling down into his preferred folding chair, which reclined a little, and flipped up a head-rest automatically, Tony shut his eyes and reached out motionlessly with his mind to activate the machine.

He hadn’t mentioned to Strange just how much of the machine was for show, and how much of it really was an extension built-out from his thoughts, anchored on structures the machine created.

Tony’s world went dark.

 

~~

 

Lucid dreams take some time to get accustomed to. Tony had gotten plenty of practice, once he’d worked out that the upgrades he’d made to his neural network and its processing power with the aid of Extremis allowed him to do a bit more with his sleep-time than ever before. He could even package up particular dream-concepts and send them to JARVIS for later de-encryption. He’d built a whole new suit design just in dreams, even.

This wasn’t quite dreaming, but it was close.

It started out dark, as he pulled the room together around him: walls, floor, sourceless ambient lighting, windows with the view from his penthouse at night, because the idea of Loki trying to fling him out of such windows again was strangely amusing. It also likely wouldn’t work here––unless Loki broke the room, the way Thor thought he might, but Tony was dangerously curious about what the god would do about that, if anything.

The room had two doors opposite each-other: one at Tony’s back, leading to his own mind, and one to Loki’s. He focused on Loki’s door, found after a few moments, he lost the ability to change its appearance, or indeed sense it in any manner but visually and, when he strode up to it, by touch. The door felt very cold under his hand. It looked like heavy oak, and somehow he just knew it was locked, blockaded, bolted shut. Raising his hand, he knocked three times.

Silence followed.

After nearly a full minute of it, Tony knocked again, louder. “Hey, Princess, I’d like a word or two with you. You’re in my house, and I’ve been pretty hospitable, now. Don’t be rude.”

After a few seconds more, there was the sound of a very heavy bolt being moved, followed by several other loud, less identifiable scraping sounds.

Tony took two decisive steps back, and waited, with his hands folded behind him.

The door didn’t open. Loki just appeared in front of it, as he was wont to do, but the door was unlocked now, and they both knew it. At least, he could be no one other than Loki, but he looked...

The trickster’s voice soon both interrupted his train of thought and confirmed his identity both, with idle greeting: “Anthony Stark.” He looked around the room slowly, as though deciphering coded messaged from the walls, though his gaze lingered for a long few moments on the windows before he met Tony’s stare with his own calm, calculating one. “Interesting means of communication you’ve chosen.”

“I’d prefer if you didn’t break it. I’ve just got a few questions.”

“You do tend to be full of them,” the trickster mused, stepping closer. He really was unfairly tall, but that wasn’t the really distracting part this time. “Ask.”

“Why are you blue?”

Loki’s expression suddenly darkened, red eyes like blood and wine. The room rattled around them for a few moments, the ambient light flickering. Then Loki wore his more usual appearance: all pale skin and dark hair, with those bright green eyes. “None of your business.”

“You actually looked like that a bit when Thor first brought you in. He wouldn’t talk about it, and once you warmed up a bit, it faded. Neither one was illusion, because you were utterly drained, and furthermore your soul was missing, so none of your magic was behind it,” Tony rattled off. “Therefore, that’s just how you look sometimes. Why?”

“I am a monster. What more reason need you?”

“All I can get. Just generally speaking.” Tony’s brow furrowed. “It’s not a bad look for you, actually. I didn’t realize your eyes had changed too, but they were closed last time. The red makes for interesting contrast.”

Loki looked at him for a moment as though he were insane, then shook his head. “Of course. You are, after all, human, and your kind has been known to be unbothered by all sorts of monstrosities outside your own species, to such a degree even as to fornicate with them. You mortals really will take all comers.”

“You should talk. I read an interesting story about you and a horse.”

“One of Thor’s few surprisingly decent attempts at slander,” Loki scathed. “I admit to being impressed by its staying power.”

“So you weren’t offering?” Tony looked him up and down a little lecherously and grinned. “You could do worse. I’m close to being a prince and a global political and economic power in my own right on this planet anyhow, as you know.”

Loki shot him that look again: like he was genuinely wondering if Tony was perhaps suffering from the effects of a bad concussion. “You really have no shame at all, do you?”

“Neither do you. Not if the way you behave in a dress is anything to go by.”

“I don’t recall you complaining,” Loki shot back.

“Not at all. Well, not until I realized I wasn’t getting the real deal.”

Loki made a thoughtful noise.

Realizing he might’ve been just a hint more sincere than he’d intended there, Tony backtracked swiftly, changing the subject back to the real issues. “So. How are you, these days, and how fake is your coma?”

The trickster smirked faintly. “Only a little.” He sidled just a little closer, so there was perhaps eight inches between them. “The damages I suffered were the worst since my return from the void between Yggdrasil and the region of space that the Chitauri are more native to. My soul was surprisingly intact, given how difficult it proved for its thief to hold on to, and how far they got with it in spite of that.”

“About that thief: any ideas who it was? You’re not the only magic-user on the planet they’ve gone after lately, by far.”

“I’m the only one from another realm, I suspect. Our souls are a bit different from those of the average mortal. It comes with our nature to some extent, but mostly the effects of age and strange travels. In my case, being Jötunn adds further difficulties for containment.”

“Yeah. We haven’t been able to track any of the others. Strange said yours was an anomaly: not contained the same way.”

“I’m good at shattering containers made by those who would underestimate me.”

Again, the floor and walls shuddered around and under them.

“You know better than to think I’d do that without having a few tricks of my own up my sleeve waiting for you,” Tony warned, low and calm.

The trickster smiled his best wicked smile. “Yes, but now I’m curious what they might be.” He reached out then, and two fingers applied gentle pressure from under Tony’s chin, tilting his head up a bit further. “I’ve met a great many mortals over the millennia and none has ever been half so interesting as you.”

“I thought it was _my_ job to flirt inappropriately.”

“Then clearly you’ve not read _enough_ of the old stories about me.” His voice turned a bit sultry then, quite unfairly.

 _Damn. That’s... really distracting. Focus, Tony, focus. Answers needed._ “Do you know who stole your soul, or not?”

Loki’s eyes narrowed. “I was not in peak condition when they struck, and there were several of them. I killed four, but the other three by then had their hooks where I had not expected they would dare aim. I have been stuck here, recuperating, and have not been able to wander far from my body, after this recent ordeal. I know not who is at the head of this: only that I have burnt their hands.”

Tony smiled a little fiercely, trying to ignore that Loki was still touching him. “Want to burn them a bit more?”

The trickster gave a thoughtful hum. “You’re proposing I work with you and your Avengers.” It wasn’t a question.

“We’ve got a common enemy, and you know how much hurt we can bring down on someone, what with how many times we’ve kicked your ass.”

Green eyes flickering for a moment, Loki switched back to his more blue-and-red appearance. “You would trust a monster not to maul you after the battle is won and we’ve all presumably survived?”

Tony shivered, because Loki’s touch was suddenly like ice. _Oh yeah: frost-giant. That must be it._ Sudden insight into Loki referring to himself as a monster struck shortly after and he wondered a bit about that; it would explain a lot. “There’s a lot of us, Loki. We can watch each other’s backs, and Thor’s since he seems to forget he needs to do that with you on a pretty consistent basis. If I allow a weak spot for you to hit, that means you’d better be aware of another Avenger already looking your way, ready to make you hurt if you decide to try and kill me yet again. Same for all of us: we’ll fight with you, but don’t think that we’ll be Thor-like enough to really trust you at our backs in a fire-fight.”

Loki hummed, thoughtful and amused. “It’s been quite a long time since I’ve aimed to actually kill you, Anthony Stark.”

The inventor raised an eyebrow. “I’d wondered a bit. I think we all know you don’t really want Thor dead, because they who would you have left to screw over when you need a pick-me-up? I figure that’s a family thing, though.”

The god of mischief looked momentarily quite surprised, before his smirk quite returned. “Very good.”

“When do you think you’ll be recovered enough to hunt with us?”

Loki hummed. “Three more days. I will remain apparently comatose until then: I shall need all of my energies.”

“So you wouldn’t be up for company in your bed with you, then? Here I was hoping I could make you feel bett––” Tony cut off at that point because Loki suddenly had him pressed hard against the wall. He swallowed tightly. “Alright. I got it. I’ll stop.”

“Oh, now that _would_ be disappointing,” Loki purred, pressing closer, bodily.

 _Oh. OH_. Tony’s mouth went dry. “Well, I’d hate to disappoint a guest.”

“You are such a strange creature, even by mortal standards. You hold even your teammates and most of your friends at arms’ length, hide your secrets from them best that you can until they nearly get you killed, and yet you so willingly share your body with anyone you find sufficiently attractive.” His face was close now, that long-limbed body surprisingly heavy and solid against him, seeming to radiate cold rather than heat. Even his breath on the inventor’s lips was cool. “You enjoy this surrender, even knowing how easily I might kill you.”

“You like me too much to kill me.” He felt something slip, then: something important. The room around them was less tangible, suddenly. His control of it was suddenly less strong, and felt almost numbed. The lighting was even a bit different––more like fire-light. The adrenaline rush of it hit fast and hard enough to set his limbs tingling, and his eyes widened a little. “Oh. Shit.”

Loki’s grin widened. “You let yourself grow too distracted.”

“Well, you’re distracting.” He smirked a little. “But so am I, or is that a magic staff in your pocket?”

The trickster seemed caught up with confusion and disbelief for a moment, pulling back slightly. “You still have no fear, here. Not of me, really.”

“I want you. And I can tell that you want me just now, and that you’re still more surprised and off-balance than I am.” He wrapped an arm around Loki’s neck, drawing him back down a bit. “It makes me wonder if you like me even more than you already knew you did.”

Loki’s expression darkened, but he didn’t resist or stiffen in any way that indicated he might be genuinely offended. “I’ve met very few minds capable of keeping pace with my own. Your mind is not like that of most humans, particularly here and now. I knew you had altered it, but not to this extent.” He narrowed his eyes a little, examining Tony’s expression a bit searchingly. “You have such potential,” he growled, sounding openly turned on this time.

Tony shivered, and not with cold. “You’re afraid.”

“So are you.”

“Yeah. Because if the only way you might be inclined to break me was as my enemy, I’d know what to expect. I like you enough, and you interest me enough, that you’re not really on my enemy list. You’re a villain, yeah, but you’re not my enemy. You’re just a pain in the ass because of how much you hate and love Thor. And if you maybe didn’t see me as an enemy either, well, that leaves me looking at more pain, potentially, knowing you.” He licked his lips absently. “And knowing me.”

Loki stood very still, then. His expression was a bit harder to read with the blue color-scheme, by firelight. “You are not lying,” he said, almost a whisper.

Tony swallowed tightly. “Yeah. Seemed pointless, with you. You see through me.”

“Not very far. Not so far as with most others.”

“You see more of me than most others do, though.”

“And you see similarly through me, all too often,” the trickster murmured. “It’s dangerously appealing.”

“You like it.”

“Hence the danger.”

Tony’s eyes widened a bit. On the list of things he’d never expected to see or hear from the god of lies and mischief, it was a surprisingly sincere admission of: _if I allowed you close, I know that you could harm me very badly, and I would not be able to stop it._ Because really, that was what this came down to, with the both of them, and all the walls they put up between themselves and the rest of the universe. Before, Tony had felt invulnerable. He’d had to deliberately lower his walls to let Pepper in far enough she could hurt him. Even then, he’d been able to see it coming. Loki had cut deep before, without even building trust first. And he’d cut Loki. They were both already under each other’s skin, as enemies. Now, here, this close and this aroused and this frightfully open––this wouldn’t be easy to walk away from. Oh, once the afterglow wore off, and they’d put their respective armor back on, there would be distance again, but there would also be temptation stronger than it was already, to draw them inexorably closer again thereafter.

And oh, was the temptation already strong.

“This is a terrible idea,” Tony said, his voice not as even as he’d have liked.

“Oh yes. One of my worst, I think,” Loki concurred.

They stared at each other for a long moment, then both began to smile viciously.

“I like a challenge,” Loki purred.

“Me too.”

“You have the potential to be the death of me,” Loki said. “You moreso than any other I can think of, given time.”

“If I didn’t want to take you apart first to see how you really work, I’d consider it more of an option.” It took an effort to work out that it was indeed his own dream they were in, and to get a couple of mental footholds in it, but he managed it. With that bit of regained control, he changed Loki’s clothes from full armor to the more casual clothing he knew the trickster to be wearing out in the real world. Then he lowered his head and licked at Loki’s exposed collarbone, smirking at the low noise the god of mischief made in response.

Then Loki’s long fingers were in his hair, gripping tight, jerking his head up, and the trickster caught his mouth in a hungry kiss, the contact making them both gasp sharply at the shock of contrast: hot and cold. Tony returned it, one arm curling around Loki’s waist to pull him in still closer as he parted his lips and got a proper taste of that silver tongue for the first time. Loki tasted like fresh snow, at first, and it seemed his relative cold made him more sensitive to the relative heat of Tony’s touch. When the inventor tugged his shirt untucked and slid his hands under it, the shudder Loki gave in response was deeply satisfying. Not long after, though, the cold started to abate, and the taste of fresh snow became fainter, replaced by spice and something simply warm and alive and uniquely Loki.

Tony found the whole thing an incredible turn-on, and thrust his hand down the front of Loki’s pants as soon as he could get them open to better express his appreciation––only for their clothing to vanish entirely. Breaking the kiss briefly, Tony panted, “Eager, are we?”

“Yes.” He then grabbed Tony’s hips and lifted him with seemingly no effort, his hands guiding the inventor’s legs to wrap around his waist. “I believe we are.”

“Yeah. Yeah, no arguments here.”

“I’m inclined to take you here.”

Tony shuddered, his legs gripping a bit tighter as Loki mouthed at his neck, those long pale hands gripping his ass. “That’s fine. Yeah, god, yeah.” With similar dream-style convenience to the sort which had vanished their clothes, Loki’s fingers were already slick where two of them pressed against Tony’s entrance, then: first gently, then with more persistence, slipping inside him slowly. He hissed a little at the burn, which was decided not-dreamlike. It had been a long while, after all. “Oh, hell, I’m gonna feel this in the morning, aren’t I?”

Loki chuckled in his ear. “I want you to. I want as much and as real as I can have of you in this place.” His fingers began moving then, slow and unhurried.

“Fine. But that means we need to fuck at least once outside a dream, or I’m going to feel kinda cheated.” Tony jerked a bit when Loki found his prostate, then gave a small cry when the god of mischief promptly revisited it with more pressure and rougher friction. “Oh, _fuck_. That’s good.” He then lost thoughts and words alike for a few moments as those long, skilled fingers continued to torment the spot.

“Interesting suggestion. Here, you have plausible deniability. This is, after all, mostly dream, and I am easy to blame there. My brother likely warned you of that, in fact, the noble fool.”

“You think I won’t want you out there because we’d be a little more likely to get caught, and I wouldn’t have the excuse of ‘the devil made me do it’ after this?” Tony panted. “You clearly underestimate just how shameless I am.”

Loki smirked then, adding a third finger. “Perhaps.” He then sped up his movements, being a bit less gentle. “And I may understand better once I’ve fucked you thoroughly. You haven’t had that in some time, I don’t think.”

“Cheeky bastard,” Tony groaned, pulling him into another kiss, this one rougher, more desperate, as Loki’s fingers drove him slowly insane. He reached down between them to stroke himself briefly, needing the friction, but it threatened to be too much. So he took hold of Loki’s cock instead, and set about bringing them onto more equal footing where desperation was concerned. It didn’t take much before Loki’s fingers left him, and curled around Tony’s wrist to stop him.

The kiss broke briefly, and Loki panted, “You’re quite good.”

“Silver-tongue, I can see. Did your fingers earn you a nickname too? They should’ve.”

The trickster chuckled, letting go of Tony’s hand and lining himself up at the the inventor’s entrance. “You’ve had only a mild dose of my tongue, for now.”

“Then we are _definitely_ doing this again. No question. Now please fuck me.”

“Yes,” Loki growled, and pushed into him, not quite slowly.

Tony’s head fell back against the wall with a light thunk as he struggled to breathe. It really had been a long time and Loki was gifted suitably for a god––which Tony was going to stand by because by that standard, proportionally, so was he. “Fuck.”

Loki bit at the side of his neck, breathing hard, muttering something obscene-sounding in an unrecognizable language, keeping himself still to let the mortal adjust. Only when Tony’s body relaxed a bit against him and the inventor rolled his hips with a decidedly encouraging moan low in his throat, did Loki let his control relax and his hips begin to move: slow only briefly, then picking up the pace and growing steadily less gentle, especially once he found the appropriate angle to make Tony Stark’s back arch and his voice rise in a breathless near-shout. “Let me hear you.”

Tony all but growled in response. “Goes both ways––god yes there _oh fuck_!”

The trickster’s lips curled with a hint of a smirk. “You want to hear how good you feel, or how lovely you look like this, wrapped around me as I’m making you come?”

“That’s––not fair.”

“Trickster god.”

“Yeah, I know, you’re fucking gorgeous and insane and insanely gorgeous when you’re fucking.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.” With that, he wrapped a long-fingered hand around Tony’s cock and began stroking him, fast and hot and-

“I think I love your hands. You just––fuck, Loki, just... h-harder!”

Loki obliged, his breathing ragged, catching Tony’s mouth with his own just before the inventor came hard in his hand, breaking away again when Tony more deliberately tightened around him, dragging the trickster closer to the edge too. “Fuck.”

“Yeah, come on, Loki, please, god, you’re good. Come for me.”

“Tony,” the trickster gasped, close to the inventor’s lips. “Tighten. Again.” He moaned when Tony obliged, then hissed when he stopped. “Don’t-”

“Say my name again,” Tony challenged.

“Tony, please.”

“Yeah.” Tony tightened, shuddering a little, over-sensitive still, but it still felt so good and Loki looked incredible like this, desperate for him. “Come for me, Loki.”

With a few more frantic thrusts, Loki did, his composure shattering as Tony milked him, so he was left gasping against the mortal’s shoulder and leaning on the wall heavily to keep them both upright.

Tony wasn’t much better, limp and sated and drained, and deeply satisfied. “Wanted that for ages,” he muttered, after nearly a full minute trying to remember how to breathe properly.

“Did you?”

“Yeah. Along with wanting to make you beg for same. I’d like to work up to that.”

Loki chuckled softly, in a good-humored manner. “If you can manage it.”

“Oh, that sounds like a challenge.”

“It is,” Loki countered, turning his head a bit to nip at Tony’s neck.

“Challenge accepted. Once you’re awake, I’ll work on that post-haste.”

The trickster hummed against his skin. “You are insane, I think.”

“So’re you. Matched set, really.”

“Fair enough.” Loki lifted his head enough to kiss him once more. “For now, I think it best you awaken, before we’re a bit less alone.”

“Wait, what?”

Too late, apparently. Because the room, the wall at his back, and Loki against his front, all abruptly vanished.

 

~~

 

Tony’s eyes snapped open and his head jerked up abruptly. He was on full alert, his senses pulling in data from hardware both biological and otherwise, and as such he could hear the sound footsteps in the hall outside, through JARVIS’ ears. He also felt distinctly uncomfortable, in a sticky manner that indicated he hadn’t been unaffected by that particularly hot dream-date out here in the real world. A glance Loki’s way showed no similar stickiness––likely the reason he’d dragged them into Tony’s head and Tony’s dream, rather than his own. “You little bastard.”

Then he crossed his legs quickly as the nearest door opened, concealing the obvious damp spot as best he could. He donned his most innocent expression as Thor and Natasha approached. Natasha looked like she’d gotten a quick briefing from Thor on Why This Looked Like A Bad Idea from Thor at some point along the way. Likely, she’d heard Tony head downstairs, and then later conversed with an equally insomniac Thor about his worries. The thunderer hadn’t been sleeping much since his brother showed up. Funny thing, that.

Tony thought to himself that he was starting to get to know these guys a bit too well, really. “I told you I’d be fine,” he said to Thor. “Your brother’s recuperating still, by the by, but he’s in the coma optionally rather than because he can’t wake up. It’s just easier for him to recover that way a bit, apparently. He’s also willing to work with us to find out who’s behind this string of soul-thefts, since he’s not sure who they are either, but he’s really pissed off at them––even more than he just generally is always pissed at you, Thor.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow. “You look pretty relaxed, for having just dealt with Loki. You’re certain he didn’t lie about everything under the sun this time?”

“I’m certain he wants to use us against another enemy he’s currently more angry with, and that he knows cooperation is the best way to go about that for now,” Tony said, and shrugged. “That’s all we really need, for now, I think.”

“You’re also certain that you are truly all right, Tony?” Thor asked, his brow deeply furrowed.

“I’m fit as a fiddle, Goldilocks.”

Natasha snorted at him. “He’s feeling smug, and looks mostly intact, Thor. Looks like Loki knew better than to mess with one of the Avengers while he still can’t leave our basement.”

“He could,” Tony corrected. “It’d just be a bad idea. Survivable, I’m sure, but really not very pretty. Especially not with JARVIS and I making things very difficult.”

“Presuming he did not incapacitate you,” Thor said flatly.

“He tried a bit. We reached an understanding.” Tony’s grin widened, becoming even more deliberately grating. “It was real fun.”

The thunderer shook his head a little with a sigh, even as he looked faintly amused. “At times you remind me of him quite disconcertingly, Tony Stark. Goodnight to you. Natasha, my apologies for causing you any undue concern.”

“Your concern was merited. Tony’s just an irritatingly brilliant dick.” She patted his arm, and started to follow him out. “Goodnight, Tony.”

“And good morning. Get some sleep at some point, Natasha. It’s not good for you, otherwise. Seriously, do you ever sleep?”

“You only say that because you often get even less. Go to bed before dawn.”

“You’re not my real mom!”

“I’ll tell Pepper!” she sing-songed, just before the door closed behind her.

“Dammit,” Tony muttered. Then he glanced sidelong at Loki while he removed his metal headband, and got to his feet. Leaning over the god of mischief, Tony considered just how insane he really must be. “You’re an ass, you know. I haven’t come in my own pants in fuckin’ years.” He removed the similar metal circlet from Loki and set it aside, examining the trickster’s face for a long moment. “I do like you. And I want to break you open and find out everything you keep inside that brilliant head of yours, because you’re so crazy I can barely keep up––but I _can_ keep up.” He leaned in, kissed the trickster’s lips briefly and then hissed in his ear, “I’ll be more than just a dream if you will.”

He went to pull away, and found a hand gripping hard at the front of his shirt.

“Stop distracting me. I’m trying to repair the connections between my body and soul, you comprehensive ass.” He didn’t even open his eyes, just muttered it.

“Just seeing if you were listening.” He kissed Loki’s hand playfully as those long fingers relaxed and the trickster fell back under. With considerable amusement, he replaced the manacle-cuff about Loki’s wrist. _I knew they wouldn’t work on him more than once or twice._ “Goodnight.”

Loki said nothing more. But that was fine.

It was already a bit more than just a dream, now.

Tony left him there, working out how much he could get done, in such a way that in about three days he’d have some breathing room, and maybe an hour or so he might be available in his bedroom to see if Loki might meet him there before anyone else worked out he was awake.

It felt like a game, for now––albeit a dangerous one, but it wouldn’t stay so light-hearted for long, not knowing the both of them. It would get complicated and painful soon enough. It would be constantly challenging. But then, they both had a fondness for challenges worthy of them. And this one was certainly insane enough to qualify.

And so were they.


	2. The Waking Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony's Holo-deck having proven its worth, Dr. Strange decides he'd like a turn. He's their occult expert, after all, and Loki is essentially rather occult. Tony does not like this plan. Thor gets a dose of insight, and the rest of the Avengers get a bit of entertainment out of the whole deal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I thought this would be a one-shot with just a little sequel? Oh, how wrong I was. This one has sort of taken off on me. Also: Hel in this fic is not like Hel in any of my other works, except for some physical resemblance. She’s still a Hel of mine, though, so her resemblance to Marvel canon? Not very notable.

Hindsight. It’s a funny thing.

 

~~

 

There’s courting danger, there’s having a death wish, and there’s potentially starting a torrid affair with Loki Lie-smith of Asgard. Tony is aware of the differences, and the crossed lines, et cetera, et cetera. He knows where all of the lines are; he just ignores them most of the time.

Once free of the Stark-deck simulation and his own Loki-influenced lucid dream both, Tony was left considering just what he’d gotten himself into. After a quick, mostly-cold shower and a change of clothes, he retreated to his private lab further up in the tower, with a cup of coffee, and settled into one of his preferred chairs. “JARVIS, I’d like your best not-too-biased opinion on a problem of an interpersonal nature. You’ll need to draw on all of the information we’ve got on Loki, and particularly your own observations.”

“Of course, sir. I take it that this is something to do with possible indiscretions in the med-wing?”

“Maybe. That you’ve noticed, has Loki been deliberately ignoring opportunities to make my life more difficult, compared to his treatment of other Avengers? Let’s use Cap as a baseline, reference Hawkeye as a special friend, and Thor as... someone he really cares about? Family outlier: of interest to know, for me, but not relevant to the rest of the calculations.” He sipped his coffee thoughtfully.

“Running comparisons of footage from past confrontations, in battle and otherwise,” JARVIS chimed. “Shall we include S.H.I.E.L.D. confrontations as well, with tangential relation to Avengers confrontations?”

“Go nuts,” Tony said. “And give me a link while you work it out, here.” He tapped the side of his head illustratively. With a flicker, his vision gained an overlay, as though a screen were in front of him playing various footage at high speed, running calculations he could feel at the edge of his mind, but he kept himself apart from them: no bias. He’d run into issues with that before. It was a hazard, when it came to running these sort of tests, as he’d learned the hard way. JARVIS could examine body language, facial expressions, and the like without getting–– _caught_ on any single one in particular. His brain, like all human brains, had a habit of making different connections, based on emotional and intuitive connections, which tended to be far less consistent. It was subject to bias. Humanity always would be. It was part of remaining human: keeping his biases, small and large.

And thus would he probably always need JARVIS: to keep the logic, the clarity, and to be his non-human baseline. His friends could help him on the more human one, when he needed it––whether he knew that he needed it or not.

But it was blissful, the click-click-click of data slotting into place, even if it was at a distance, and not in his own head, when it finally crackled into a clear series of pictures. “Lookin’ good. Let’s get a summary.”

“In comparison to Steve Rogers, you are significantly more inconvenienced.”

Tony considered. “Not shocking. Compared to Barton?”

“You are endangered near-mortally 25% more frequently than Agent Barton.”

“That’s not surprising. Please wow me.”

“This is because Loki seems to go further out of his way to inconvenience you than Agent Barton, utilizing 10% more time and 39% more resources.”

“So he goes further out of his way to screw with me, but I only come closer to death than _Barton_ , a quarter of the time,” Tony mused. “That’s... interesting.”

“I may have also found six separate occasions on which he has saved Thor’s life through fairly indirect means, four of which could not be easily tracked back to him in any manner without footage from multiple cameras at several different locations, given his knack for teleportation.”

“Predictable,” Tony muttered into his cup, before taking another sip.

“And three occasions that he’s similarly prevented near-mortal or guaranteed lethal injury from afflicting your own person.”

The inventor choked quietly, and coughed a bit. “That’s... look, I know at least twice he’s saved the Avengers’ collective asses, but that was because he needed us for some other scheme and-”

“I factored those out entirely. There remain three occasions that you were the sole person affected in any beneficial manner aside from Loki himself.”

Tony blinked for a few moments. “Uhm. Of those three, how often was I featured in some crucial part of some overarching, nefarious plans afterward?”

“One, but calling that involvement ‘vital’ is rather questionable. He obviously could have used you, or Victor von Doom, to equal effect in that particular scheme, which is part of why the both of you collided in the particular manner you did.”

Tony stood up, then, finishing his coffee and setting the mug aside calmly. “So he’s not out to kill me, which I suspected, but it’s still a bit jarring, somehow.” He ran a hand through his hair. “What are the odds that I’m being manipulated for the sake of an evil plot, here? Based on past data.”

“I’m unable to say, sir. We lack a sufficient amount of data for me to calculate this, in your particular case.”

“Particular? I’m an anomaly in this department to that extent?”

“You are the only Avenger, and indeed the only person who qualifies as a ‘hero’ of any sort, that he has made any attempts to seduce, to be frank. It does not seem to be a gambit he uses terribly often with men or women. It is, in fact, more of Amora’s forte, which might go far in explaining why he is not so heavy-handed with it, despite being a shape-shifter with––if Thor is to be believed––more than healthy appetites.”

“I’ve seen him in a dress three times now, and those second two, I wasn’t exactly the primary target,” Tony insisted.

“Actually, you were.”

“Uhm. What?”

“At least, you were the primary target his guise was intended to garner recognition from. If he had truly wanted to avoid your particular attention, would he not have chosen a female form that you did not recognize? He was not unaware of your presence, obviously.”

Tony mulled that over. “He was showing off.”

“As the both of you seem so wont to do,” JARVIS deadpanned.

“He’s a great audience,” the inventor muttered, then caught himself. “My god. I’ve been doing it, too.”

“Aren’t you always?”

“But particularly for Loki, I pull out all the stops, because I can, and––and because I know he’s watching.” He dragged his teeth across his lower lip. “You’re certainly not helping persuade me that this is a bad idea.”

“Then I’ve been quite remiss. Should I perhaps point out that Loki Lie-smith has a tendency to make regular attempts to usurp or outright torment those who still seem to somehow qualify as his ‘loved ones’?”

“That’s family. Rest assured that whatever might sort of be between Loki and I, it’s not _familial_ in any way.”

“Given the issues you both have with paternal figures, I do hope so.”

“JARVIS, did you just accuse your maker of having daddy issues?”

“You did design me to be observant, sir.”

Tony considered. “Fair enough.”

 

~~

 

The next morning brought forth some difficulties.

Namely: Strange wanted his own chance to interrogate Loki. Particularly after Amora wound up one of the next victims, and it became quite clear that their opponent, whoever they may be, had figured out how to handle off-earth souls, because Strange can’t track hers.

“This is a bad idea,” Tony said flatly. “You can’t be serious. Not after how nervous you were about me doing it in the first place.”

“I’m an experienced mage, Tony, and have substantial defenses against invasion of my own mind,” the sorcerer insisted. “I also am more experienced when it comes to what questions to ask of tricksters who spend much time wandering the astral plane. I may be better able to draw out some clues as to the nature of his attacker.”

Tony resisted the urge to snort dismissively, but he did scowl. “He wants his ‘attacker’ gutted, hung, and dried for him to later cut up into bits and serve over fresh garden greens, Strange, and he’s not above getting other people to do his work for him when it comes to things like capture, theft, and tracking down things he wants. He’s taken advantage of us for those very purposes before. If he had any clues, he’d have given them to us.”

“Not if he believed we might catch his attacker and prevent him doing anything too inhumane to him,” Strange countered.

Only half-suppressing a bitter chuckle, the inventor shook his head slowly. “We wouldn’t. Not if he didn’t want us to. He’s had plenty of time to plan.”

“He couldn’t have known you’d reach him before he recovered.”

“He doesn’t need that long to come up with a plan. Trust me.”

“I think you overestimate him.”

“You have to, with him. If you do any less, he’ll find a way to hamstring you. There’s a reason it still takes all of the Avengers, and usually some other backup too, to take him down whenever he drops one of his schemes into play. It’s not because we just tend to miss a few _particularly occult_ clues.”

“Then let us consult the rest of your team.”

Unfortunately, all Avengers but Thor agree with Strange’s plan. It was as thought they couldn’t see the harm in letting him, since Tony had gotten out seemingly unscathed. Tony wasn’t about to correct them on that. In fact, he’d gotten out well-shagged, with a faint hickey high on his neck just under his ear that he could swear he’d seen Natasha looking at with a hint of suspicion twice during the meeting––but unharmed. So far.

Thor looked resigned, but deeply concerned. “My brother and Tony Stark are not wholly dissimilar, and Loki respects him as a worthy opponent. It is most likely that he knows only a little of you, but he has a history with Midgardian magic users...”

“What sort of history?” Steve asked nervously.

“He enjoys ‘humbling’ them,” the thunderer said lightly.

This, unfortunately, only made Strange more stubborn, even as the others seemed to suddenly become aware of just how badly this might go wrong. “He will not find me easily humbled.”

“He likes a challenge,” Tony muttered.

“Then I won’t offer him one,” Strange shot back. “Unlike some, I can curb my ego, when needs must.”

“You’re doing a great job,” the inventor deadpanned coldly. “I can hardly tell your pride has been hurt at all.”

“Speaking of pride,” Natasha interrupted, “I think we’re all surprised he didn’t decide to undermine yours again, Tony. Anything you’d like to tell us about that? Anything that might help sway us in favor of not letting Strange do precisely what you decided to do before all the pros and cons were weighed by the rest of us?”

“You put yourself in danger, Tony,” Steve added. “You know we can’t afford to have you potentially incapacitated right now.”

“Or otherwise compromised,” the redheaded assassin mused.

Tony frowned slightly, looking thoughtful. “I get Loki. He knows I get him. Thor was spot-on, there: it’s a ‘know thy enemy’ thing and we have a sort of unspoken understanding. I don’t want to say it’s anything like trust, but when I knock on his door after keeping him safe under my roof awhile, he’s polite. He’s polite, despite, if not because of, knowing that I still expect a knife in the back at any moment. I treat him like he’s as dangerous as I know him to be, and don’t make the mistake of underestimating or, ah, dismissing him as unable to harm me.” He shot a slightly pointed glance Thor’s  way. It had occurred to him more than once that the reason Loki got offended when Thor made any emotional appeal, or lowered his guard around his brother, it was because the trickster saw it as Thor not taking him seriously––not accepting his brother on the terms Loki himself set for them, but instead trying in vain to move them both backward, closer to the way they used to be. “And he knows better, by now, than to think I’d come knocking if I didn’t have a few tricks and traps up my sleeves to use against him if he decided to play rough.” That brought forth a bit of sense-memory: the shock of cold from an abrupt, ungentle kiss. Tony cleared his throat and avoided looking at Natasha. She had enough clues, if he had to guess: no need to drop any more than he could really help. “He doesn’t know you, Strange. He just knows of you. There’s no way he doesn’t, Dr. Sorcerer Supreme Gordita that you are. And that means he’ll have absolutely zero interest in anything other than screwing with you.”

“Then perhaps you had better accompany him,” T’Challa said.

Both Strange and Tony spun around at that, looking scandalized. “What?!”

They chose to ignore the fact they’d said that in unison, even as the rest of the Avengers looked deeply amused.

“I admit, that would ease my mind,” Thor mused.

Tony shot him a glare.

Thor only grinned a little smugly. Like the others, he had a feeling this would be entertaining, to say the least, but more than that, the thunderer seemed to have just a hint of suspicion aimed Tony’s way. That couldn’t bode well.

“All in favor?” Strange asked, also beginning to smirk now.

All hands raised except Tony Stark’s.

“I loathe every single one of you,” the inventor growled.

“You have some upgrades to make to your device, no doubt,” T’Challa said.

“Yeah, yeah. Give me an hour, tops. And I hate all of you.”

 

~~

 

Modifying his beloved holo-deck went well enough.

Despite the fact Thor seems intent on lurking nearby, seeming to alternate staring at his unconscious adoptive brother, and Tony’s handiwork. It’s more than a little unnerving, the inventor will freely admit––if only to himself, in his own head.

“What’s on your mind, Fabio?” he asks, after almost thirty minutes of not-quite-comfortable silence. Usually he and Thor can pull off the silent camaraderie thing, but today, something’s off.

“You showed more insight into Loki’s mind than I might have expected.”

Tony absorbed that for a moment, as he reached for another small tool; it was intricate, detailed work. “I dunno why you’re surprised.”

“It has been years since I treated Loki dismissively. He has seen to it that he cannot be ignored.”

The inventor rolled his eyes. “Patently untrue. You dismiss him every time you plea for him to act like the loving brother you remember him to be, because it’s still clearly not occurred to you just how much of that, even before the conflict between you two escalated to interplanetary warfare, was a lie before you even acknowledged everything that was wrong with your lives that led up to the conflict.”

Thor made an indignant, angered sound and stepped closer, looming and intimidating and every inch the god of thunder that humans from more ancient civilizations quaked before. “You know little of what you speak.”

“We’ve been at this how long, now, as Avengers? I’ve seen how many way-too-personal arguments between the two of you?” Tony waved his free hand in an expansive gesture, not even looking up from the machinery he was working on. “You’re not the only one with a moderately fucked-up family wherein the paternal figure at the heart of it is an asshole who doesn’t see a problem making someone struggle for approval they’re never going to get.” He did glance up at Thor, then. “I faked more affability and cooperation than I really wanted to for a long, long time to keep him approving of me most of the time, right up until my mom died, okay? And every time we fought after that, he’d ask me why he could barely recognize me anymore, why I was so damn different all of a sudden––and the answer was because he never gave a shit enough in the first place to find out who I really was behind my approval and support of him, and the tricks I did that he took credit for, because he was my dad. Like that gave him any right to own what I did, and leave me in his shadow, because I happened to be a product of a biological process he took part in.” Tony then realized that at some point, he’d risen to his feet and squared off with Thor, and was now staring him down. He fell silent, then, waiting, reading the thunder god’s face.

For his part, Thor looked stunned and off-balance. He also seemed to be looking at the human inventor with entirely new eyes. “This is what you see in my brother?” He asked quietly.

“It’s easy to recognize things when you see them in the mirror a little too often.” Tony tilted his head a little to one side. “You get to learn it the easy way, if you can be bothered to try.”

Thor’s eyes flashed and his expression hardened again. “You think me incapable of coming to understand my own brother?”

“I think you understand him fairly well, as your brother, but he doesn’t, anymore. You’re the one that’s approved of, forgiven, and loved. He’s not, anymore.” Tony swallowed past a tightness in his throat. “You need to accept that you know no more about him than he wanted you to, and embrace doubt, because blind faith on both your parts is what got you both here, and it’s an insult to keep offering it like pity to someone who has been lying to you and tricking you for so long.”

“You’re aware that he’s doubtlessly listening?” Thor muttered.

Tony shut his eyes with an expression of resignation. “Yeah, I figured.”

The thunderer half-laughed, in a manner more bitter and self-deprecating than Tony would have suspected him to be capable of. “You appear to have a wealth of insight into his mind that I cannot help but envy, Tony Stark.”

“Don’t envy it. It wasn’t fun getting to this point.”

Thor sobered, then. “I am sorry, my friend, for underestimating you.”

“People underestimating me keeps me alive. You’ve just let me know my game of misdirection and feigned devil-may-care attitude is still working perfectly fine.” He offered a wide and disconcerting grin that almost reached his eyes.

Shooting the inventor a warm look, Thor shook his head. “You remind me of him, when he was younger, and had not begun hiding behind masks more often than not, in my presence.”

“I promise I won’t take over any planets––unless I absolutely have to.”

“It does not concern you?”

“That I’m similar to him in any way?”

“I believe it is those similarities that have drawn him to you.”

Tony blinked. “Pardon?”

“I have been aware of his abiding interest in you, Tony. I may not know him as I once did, but I can tell when my brother has developed a fascination with someone, rare though the occurrence has been.” He smiled faintly. “Loki is easily bored by most minds, immortal or mortal. I get the impression that he cannot decipher you so easily.”

“We did just acknowledge that he’s probably eavesdropping, didn’t we?”

“I may want him to know that I suspect he has found a worthy adversary for his mind, and to be careful of you. Also, for you to be careful of him. Insightful though you may be, you can be tricked just as well as the rest of us.”

Tony felt a bit staggered, his face heated a bit and his spine was suddenly frozen stiff. “Well, this just got weird. Are you giving him permission to woo me or something?”

Thor smirked. “I suspect he has already made clear his interest, or you would dismiss my statements entirely and accuse me of being delusional.”

“Well, ‘clear’ is a bit of an overstatement,” Tony said slowly, “but there’s interest. Not just his, either. Problem?”

Thor shook his head. “Not yet.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since you showed no fear of approaching my brother with your device.”

Tony smirked. “Funny. I didn’t know anything about it, right then.”

Thor’s eyes widened, then narrowed, glancing at the mark on the inventor’s neck with dawning suspicion and uneasy understanding. “You are mad, Tony Stark.”

“Yep. What can I say: your brother likes his fascinations insane.” He winked shamelessly at the still-slightly-scandalized Thor, and waved him off. “Go tell Strange to be down here in forty minutes. Tell the others to fuck off and we don’t need an audience.”

 

~~

 

They had an audience. Of course.

Tony swore at all of them, but they didn’t budge.

Clint was sitting cross-legged on one of the lab tables with a huge bowl of popcorn in his lap. Natasha and Bruce were crowded in on either side of him, munching with him. T’Challa occasionally reached over from his own perch beside Natasha on the same table. Even Steve stole a handful guiltily.

Strange was quiet, and without a word settled into a chair slightly less awesome than Tony’s and allowed the mad inventor to place the crown of metal and circuitry on his head again. Tony wasn’t surprised when Thor put the appropriate circlet on his brother’s head, but found the gesture oddly touching: it looked almost like passing on a real crown, and there had to be some deeper meaning he was missing in it.

Tony clicked his tongue and picked up a couple of tools, bending over the contraption on Loki’s head as though he’d spotted something askew. He muttered, just too quiet for the others to hear, “For the record, this was so not my idea.”

Then, all too soon, he was in his own chair, with his own headpiece, and the room was going dark around him, until he couldn’t sense the others at all.

Except Strange. He could sense Strange all too well.

Reconstructing the meeting room was easy, though it seemed to startle the Sorcerer slightly: how quick, how solid, and how relentlessly real and rational it all seemed, all at once.

“You made some improvements?”

“No,” Tony said. “I didn’t exactly feel a need to put you in a metaphorical bank vault, during the early test phases, security-wise. This is how I more usually operate.”

Strange fell quiet, staring at and through the design of the room around them, as Loki had done the first time around. “This is––this is very nearly akin to a number of the more frightfully solid places in the astral plane. I must admit that I am impressed that you’ve done this with a machine.”

“He didn’t,” Loki interrupted, suddenly appearing in front of his door, in full armor and his more Aesir-like appearance. At Strange’s startled look, he offered one of his more unnerving vicious smiles. “I didn’t feel like waiting for you to knock.”

Strange straightened up a little. “I see. Care to explain your assertion?”

“This is not machine-made.” Loki gestured at the room around him. “It is merely machine-anchored. The construction is wholly within dear Tony’s mind.”

“Good catch,” the inventor acknowledged.

“But these structures-” Strange began.

“Are formed of intricate patterns of perception, logic, and understanding of the matter and space, similar to that of advanced magics known in Asgard, but of a different color or dialect: like the difference between reciting words as though reading a poem, and singing them with feeling to a complex tune,” Loki concluded, holding Tony’s gaze with a well-masked expression: no hint of emotion visible.

Tony doesn’t need to see it to know what’s behind Loki’s words. He wants to learn Tony’s language as the inventor writes it. Even on those occasions that Loki knows what the next words are in a particular verse, he’s still never heard _this_ song before. “Like it?” he asked, his voice rather lighter and more playful than his expression.

“I admit that watching your progression in understanding of the universe throughout our acquaintance has on occasion given me insight into deeper, or even entirely new, meanings to things that I already knew, to an extent that has even altered the landscape of my own personal understanding of the universe more than anyone else has managed to do in centuries,” Loki added. His look turned a little heated then, if only for a moment.

It was enough to make Tony’s mouth run dry. Because there was a god of mischief teasing him with intellectual foreplay, and oh, he liked that more than he should, especially given that Strange was in here with them this time, and the Avengers would definitely notice if either he or the god of mischief wound up with a hard-on. Tony cleared his throat. “I’m flattered. Now, about why this guy is here...”

“He believes himself more mystically informed and better able to pick up any hints about who ripped out my soul than yourself?”

“Lucky guess,” Strange deadpanned. “You can hear all of us, can’t you?”

“Well, perhaps,” Loki mused, smirking. “I’ve little to do right now, aside from listen, and rebuild. Speaking of: I understand that it’s you I have to thank for the return of my soul to its proper, hmm, container.” He gestured toward himself.

“Yours was the only one I could track, as I’m sure you’ve guessed.”

The trickster hummed thoughtfully. “Has Amora been attacked as of yet?”

“Yes,” Strange said gravely.

“Mine is older, and stranger: neither human nor Aesir. Jötunn souls are known for this particular wild, containment-resistant quality. It’s to do with their connection to nature, in their native world,” Loki explained. “Not even the most powerful mages still left in Asgard in my absence could bind the souls of mere foot-soldiers of Laufey. This hinders what harmful magics they can be subjected to, as well, of course. A purely Aesir soul like Amora’s would have been _much_ easier for them to handle.”

“So we’re looking for someone who knew you well enough to try a different means of containing you,” Tony cut in, “but not well enough to know you weren’t Aesir by blood and all.”

Loki nodded. “Yes.”

“And you have no clue who that might be? Tony told us so, but do pardon my disbelief,” Strange asked.

The trickster shot him a glare. “I do owe you a boon, for your return of my soul. Feel lucky that I have chosen to acknowledge it. I needn’t, you know; I’m not the same sort of god that Thor and the others are.”

“Your soul resists being bound by other people. What about you?”

Loki smirked at him. “Very good. Like Thor, I can be bound by my own promises, and by debts, but only if I choose to be.”

“And how do we know you’ve chosen to be?” Strange asked.

“If I offer you my solemn word, freely and of my own volition, I will be no more able to break it than Odin would be,” Loki said, and shrugged. “In your case, I acknowledge that I owe you a boon, on the condition that my repayment will be the answering of your questions honestly, while we stand in this in-between place of Tony’s creation. Once you have exited, my sincerity can be freely doubted, but for now, you have my word that any answers I give, should I chose to offer an answer at all, will be true.” The trickster god’s smile went wide and full of teeth, then: challenging.

“Usually, the one owed the boon chooses the repayment,” Strange said slowly.

“You should know better than to expect fairness from a trickster,” Loki shot back. “You are lucky, that I did not choose instead to make you regret ever making the presumption that a rescued snake will not poison you with its bite. I pride myself as a teacher of such valuable life-lessons.”

The sorcerer swallowed thickly, and crossed his arms over his chest. “What do you know about your attacker?”

“That they were intelligent enough not to come after me themselves,” Loki said, rather scathingly. “Instead, they sent servile creatures with no particular unique features, and channeled their magics through the largest of them. They were golemic: creatures of stone and servitude with scrolls of instructions in their heads. It is not uncommon for spells to be concealed in them, but it is not altogether usual for the spells to kick in only after they have been broken open. It caught be off-guard, and I was still weakened from my recent encounter with Chthon. I remember nothing after that, save cold, and rage, and pain, until I was returned to my body.”

Strange swore, beginning to pace.

Loki and Tony exchanged glances, and the trickster ceased his nonchalant leaning against the door into his own mind, and approached them, standing at Tony’s side in a manner more akin to comrades-in-arms than I-tapped-that-yesterday, which the inventor does appreciate.

“Were the remains of a golemic servant found near Amora’s recently soul-free self?” Loki asked casually.

Strange paused, turning on his heel to face them both. “Possibly. We collected a few things from the scene. What did they look like?”

“Polished black marble, when together, but they faded to gray once shattered,” the trickster said. “Their base materials were most likely clay with volcanic ash, and shards of obsidian. They had rather sharp claws.”

Strange rubbed at his own chin for a moment. “We might have found a bit of that. If we have, it might be traceable.”

“The golems were not made by their master,” Loki said.

“How do you know?” the sorcerer asked sharply.

“Because it’s what I would do,” the trickster shot back. “And have you wondered why you yourself have not yet been a target? Has von Doom been targeted either?”

“What do you know?” Strange demanded.

“I know nothing for certain,” Loki crooned, “but I suspect much.”

“You think it’s an enemy of his?” Tony muttered, jerking his head at Strange. “Are they just saving him for last?”

Loki hummed. “I think Strange is very lucky, and unlucky, all at once. Whoever this is not only knows him, but wants him afraid. While he’s hiding amongst all of you, he is further out of reach than he might be otherwise, but not unreachable. Observe.” Loki extended a hand toward Strange, who raised his arms and muttered a spell, which seemed to flare red around him defensively, only to shatter as Loki’s gesture ended with a quick flourish and a whispered syllable. Then Strange stood far too still, looking suddenly pale as Loki’s fingers closed on air and he seemed to pull.

“Loki,” Tony growled. “Stop.”

“I will not stop merely because you ask it of me,” the trickster said, low and deadly. It was a warning: _do not suppose you can change me, or make me into a hero like you._

“Of course you wouldn’t. I’m actually suggesting you stop because you need him around as much as we do just now, if you want to get the revenge you’re after,” Tony responded, not missing a beat. He met Loki’s gaze as the trickster looked away from Strange. “He’s either a key component for some reason, or he’s their favorite victim for the time being, but either way, he’s more useful intact than not. You can finish bruising his pride later, if you still want to, anyway.”

Loki smiled wide and toothy again, but there was something a little more sincere, and heated than before. There was desire in that look, like a slow, delicious burn. “Your intellect and penchant for extraordinary insight are both most distracting, Tony.”

“You can enjoy that later, too,” the inventor murmured, controlling the sound so it wouldn’t make its way to Strange’s ears. “Stop wasting your energy on him.” He jabbed a thumb in Strange’s direction. “So you can hopefully get around to showing me your appreciation sooner rather than later.”

The trickster licked his lips quickly, and released his hold on Strange.

The sorcerer fell to the floor of the room in a heap, gasping for breath.

“I did try to warn you,” Tony called over to him.

“Shove it, Stark.”

“You may thank him for persuading me not damage you in any lasting way,” Loki offered. “Though I only did so with the understanding you would be proving _useful_. If you prove anything less, I will not hesitate to make your life a misery.”

“He’s been practicing that art in Asgard longer than he’s been studying magic, if you believe the people he’s pranked,” Tony offered.

“Don’t reduce my threats to mere pranks,” Loki scathed.

“Your ‘pranks’ have nearly destroyed this entire planet at least twice,” the inventor shot back. “Where, exactly, is the reduction?”

Loki snorted. “Flattery will get you everywhere.” He sounded sarcastic this time.

“Promise?” Tony offered a lecherous grin.

“Tony Stark, I will kill you,” Strange growled.

“What?” the inventor asked innocently. “What’d I do?”

The sorcerer pulled himself slowly to his feet, glaring all the while. “Most superheroes aren’t exactly on such friendly terms with their arch-nemesis as to _flirt_ with them, Stark.”

“Fine. I admit: he’s my favorite,” Tony sighed.

Loki raised an eyebrow at him.

“What? I’m allowed to have a favorite villain. Don’t tell _me_ I’m not your favorite Avenger, you asshole. You know I am.”

After a few moments of thoughtful staring, the trickster tilted his head, still wearing the same skeptical expression, with his words devoice of inflection as he said, “Given the options to choose from, I have gotten on fairly well with Spider-man, actually.”

“You’re a rotten liar.”

“I’m an excellent liar, as you well know.”

“Yeah, yeah. I respect you as a fellow artist, in that regard.”

Loki’s expression showed that flicker of heat again.

“Tony, if you don’t stop, I _will_ tell Thor,” Strange sighed.

“My brother is aware,” Loki said, in casual tones, as though discussing the weather or something equally mundane.

Strange shot him a look. “Oh god, this is a regular occurrence?”

“It’s not exactly unheard-of,” Tony admitted.

“It goes with your reputation as a promiscuous and carefree prince-like figure who flirts with anything on two legs,” Loki mused.

“You should talk.”

The trickster shrugged. “I’m a Norse god. It’s what we do.” He then turned to Strange. “If you can find traces of the spell which removed Amora’s soul, that will give you more to work with than the golems themselves. Such a spell is far more unique than the servants who have been delivering it.”

“Fine. Good.”

“Any more questions?” Loki asked, all mock-innocence.

“Not for the moment, but we’ll keep you posted,” the sorcerer grit out. “Tony? Get me out of here.”

Tony snapped his fingers, and did just that, lingering for a moment himself. He shot Loki a look.

Loki hummed low in his throat, thoughtful. “I want you.”

“I got the feeling.” Tony smirked. “I’d love to see about making you beg while I’m here, but we’ve got an audience out there, and last time, there was some evidence they’d definitely notice.”

The trickster smirked and touched the mark his teeth had left on Tony’s neck. “Soon, then. Two more days, if that.”

“Made a bit of progress?”

“There’s something to be said for the beneficial, head-clearing effects of fucking you against a wall.”

Tony felt a shiver roll down his spine. “Oh, really?”

Loki pressed a kiss to his mouth, teasing at first, then suddenly deep and filthy, just for a moment, before he pulled back. “Yes.”

“I’d like you bend over one of my lab tables, I think.”

“Then you will have to persuade me.”

“Then wake up soon,” Tony shot back, and vanished, along with the room around them, in a whisper of something like crackling static.

 

~~

 

Tony opened his eyes to find the others looking at him a bid oddly, which was unfair. He wasn’t even hard in his jeans or flushed or anything, which he considered to be one hell of an accomplishment. Thor was the only one who looked unsurprised. That, he supposed, was down to the thunderer having Figured It Out and all. “What?”

“We hadn’t expected a delay before you joined us,” Strange said. He was looking at Tony with a bit of open suspicion now.

The inventor shrugged. “We make a point of applying a mindgame, or some threats, or making a sort of challenge before ending a conversation. It’s a bit to do with our first conversation ending after I threatened him and said there was no way he could win, he said we’d all fall, and threw me out a window. Call it tradition.”

The others rolled their eyes at him, except T’Challa and Strange. T’Challa was looking strangely amused for some reason Tony could hardly guess at, until Natasha elbowed him sharply. Uneasily, the inventor wondered if they maybe had a betting pool in place regarding him and Loki, and wondered if it was about whether it was about sex, or Tony getting himself killed over unwise flirting. It was impossible to tell.

 _Both_ , he decided. _Probably both_.

He recognized it because of his own habit of starting similar pools about Thor and Jane, and on when Natasha and Clint would give up and have make-up sex after various disasters that put them both on edge, and T’Challa after he met the X-men and particularly the lovely Storm...

Actually, Tony felt oddly left out, since being the subject of the pool excluded him from making any bets, this time. He’d have to have JARVIS find out what the stakes were to make them all as miserable as possible.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “I’m a Norse god. It’s what we do.” is a line from Marvel canon that is apt, but does clash with my personal head-canon for MCU-Loki. (In Marvel-616, Loki says it after mentioning how he's had dozens, if not hundreds of daughters over the centuries. I think of MCU-Loki as a bit less careless in the parenting department, if only out of contrariness.) Still a damn good line, though.
> 
> Also: if you recognised the title of this chapter, kudos to you on having seen an obscure film from my hometown.


	3. From that Undiscovered Country

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More souls are stolen, two X-men are inexplicably kidnapped, and Tony calls in a favor owed to him by a certain goddess. He doesn’t expect her to want to see Loki, though.

The next day, they spent most of their time almost getting killed. Tony resolved to blame the X-men, but only in his own head. Their distress signal had started the whole mess, and what a mess it was. Someone out there really, really wanted to get their hands on Jean Grey and the Summers brothers––and in the latter case they succeeded. Both men were taken, and they were taken _whole_ , rather than incorporeally: their bodies collected after some golem-like soldiers (much like the ones Loki had described) finished incapacitating them via soul-theft. It was also clear that Jean had been targeted similarly, just less successfully. No one, as of yet could work out why: everything else about the attack matched the M.O. of their soul-thief.

Apparently, the mysterious soul-thief had gotten keen on kidnapping mutants, all of a sudden, and not just telepaths.

They managed to bring in more chunks of golem than previously, but the samples degraded quickly, and Strange was left examining them in some of the increasingly rare free lab-space in the Fantastic Four’s quarters at the Baxter building.

Jean was prevented from having her soul ripped out by sudden interference from one of the younger X-men, whom Tony was actually rather more fond of: Rogue. Though saying he was fond of her might be a bit misleading; she intimidated him, and mocked him, and was made of southern spitfire sass in a way that made her impossible for him to brush off if she didn’t care to be brushed off. In life and death situations, she drove him absolutely out of his mind with annoyance to the point he’d actively considered causing a “friendly fire” incident and making it look accidental. In less intense fights, or even in a social context, he liked talking to her and aiming her fire at other people to watch them get burned.

So delivering her unconscious body to the Baxter Building to keep with the rest of the victims in their medical wing felt _wrong_ on so many levels. They’d fought with X-men support a lot over the years, and they’d seen a lot of Rogue in that time, but they’d never seen her––lifeless. Two of the X-men, Jean and Logan, had come with her, joining Pietro and one or two other mutants related to victims of recent soul-theft.

“Alright, you’re the know-it-all jackass of your party,” Logan said sharply, appearing almost out of thin air in front of Tony before the inventor could remove more than his helmet. “What’s going on here?”

“We still don’t know.” Three long adamantium claws suddenly hovered very close to the underside of his chin. The inventor snorted. “Oh, come on. You’re not an idiot.”

“I don’t care what ‘we’ know, Stark, what do _you_ know?”

Tony considered. “I know that whoever it is, they aren’t from Asgard, and they likely are either saving Strange for last, or deliberately screwing with him. You got a list of his metaphysical enemies lying around anywhere?”

Logan rumbled thoughtfully. “Xavier might.”

“We asked him. He didn’t know.”

The Wolverine retracted his claws. “Who else you got?”

“An old enemy of our own, the only soul this one couldn’t keep ahold of.” He stopped, suddenly getting an idea. “Who has a surprisingly helpful family, sometimes, now I think of it, and one of them owes me a favor.”

“Then get your metal ass in gear, boy.”

“Do not call me ‘boy’ you first-world-war geezer.” He then grinned, considering Loki. “That said, don’t take any offense: I’ve had older.”

Logan made a face. “Save it for the tabloids, Stark. They actually want to hear it.”

“Which is why it’s no fun. HEY! THOR!”

 

~~

 

That was how he wound up with the goddess of death in Avenger’s Tower that same evening, looking amused and bored and annoyed that he’d remembered this boon she owed to the Avengers, after the time they stopped a power-mad Loki from taking over her realm, along with all the others, with the Odinforce and other resources.

“I’ve got some questions. No favors or major physical exertions: just information. You can then happily scratch me off your ‘boon I.O.U.’ list and all. Just me, though,” Tony began. “Would you like a drink?”

“You have a deal. I could do worse for conversational company than yourself.” Hel hummed thoughtfully. “And I seem to recall you bragging about the quality of your Scotch, so I’m inclined to accept it.”

Pouring her some, over ice, Tony started, “So, know anyone else aside from you whose been after a lot of tasty, tasty souls lately? ”

Amused, the goddess accepted the drink when he proffered it, and took a demure sip. She was a bit taller than Tony, with only semi-dark hair: red-gold on one side which looked almost perfectly human (or Aesir?), and pitch-black on the other, which displayed skin bluer than denim and overlaid with darker near-black whorls akin to wood grain in shape and variation. She had her father’s green eye on the lighter side, and a pale grey iris swimming in inky black-stained sclera on the other. “I have noticed someone occasionally snatching up a few prematurely of recent, yes.”

“Not enough to bother you.”

“It would bother me if they were less _terrestrial_. The souls are from the living, not the dead, so until your victims are corpses and those souls prove still unforthcoming, or the souls are actually destroyed, the war is not mine to incite. That said, I’ve been keeping an eye out. This is clearly someone new at the game, clearly, using spells borrowed from a new master. I’ve seen it before.” She rolls her eyes. “Someone just taught precisely the _wrong_ person how to harness souls for power and personal gain, no doubt.”

“They did run into a bit of a stumbling-block when they tried to snatch Loki’s.”

Hel’s expression darkened. “His soul is mine to guide when he makes whatever sorry mistake will lose it for him, with his death. I’m the only one who knows the proper place for it to go, and the only one who may deliver it.” She sounded deeply offended. “Someone is overstepping their bounds more than I thought.”

“And they know it, or whatever teacher is guiding them does. They didn’t have nearly as much trouble with Amora, so Aesir are an easier catch for them, and possibly something they’ve got a little more experience with.”

Hel hummed, low and thoughtful. “But not Jötunns,” she mused.

“What makes the souls of magic-users and telepaths so different, anyhow?”

“Depends what you’re using them for,” Hel explained. “It’s not like using someone’s mind; souls behave quite differently, and more simply. Souls that are taken unnaturally from someone, let’s say a few mortals, and transported in some form of containment, to another plane. If those souls have never been to that plane before with a body tethering them back to the physical world, and a mind to help them cohere in the metaphysical one, they break down. Add in a single, sufficiently powerful soul in the same container, like Amora’s, and it will keep them from spoiling like milk left out in the sun, but even a soul like hers would only provide that resilience to perhaps four or five less pre-acclimated souls in the same vessel.”

“This sounds suspiciously like ‘ooh, someone is going to open a door that no one should ever, ever open, and let something terrible in,’ all over again,” Tony sighs.

Hel patted his hand. “You’ll get used to it. We all do.”

“Get used to _this_?”

“What’s the turn of phrase? Father used to enjoy it, a few centuries ago when he became enamored with human theater. ‘Oh what fools these mortals be.’”

Tony snorted. “Yeah, yeah. Deep down, we’re all Pandora.”

“You as much as any of them. You carry your boxes with you.” She glanced down at his arc reactor, then met his gaze again.

Frowning only a little, the inventor narrowed his eyes. “Now you sound like him.”

“There is no shame in it. Much though I loathe him more recently, for obvious reasons political and personal, he remains someone I’m proud to call my father. No one else has caused Odin this much trouble without actually bringing war in from another dimension, like Dormammu.”

“Derma-whatnow?”

“Dormammu,” Hel said. “He actually not only began his own war with Asgard, but indirectly started the war between Asgard and Jötunnheim.”

Tony’s eyebrows raised. “That’s an impressive degree of pain in the ass.”

“I trust your expert opinion.”  
The inventor didn’t give her the satisfaction of flinching at the insinuation that he was expert at both being a pain in the ass, and starting wars. “How’d he start the war with the Jötunns?”

“Odin asked Laufey for aid in combatting Dormammu’s forces. He saw it as a means to unify them after years of building political tensions, and Jötunns have a natural resistance to the soul-based magics in use by Asgard’s more pressing enemies,” Hel said lightly. “Laufey refused, and then sent a few of his more powerful mages to aid Dormammu, in exchange for promise that Jötunnheim would remain untouched by him.”

“Ouch,” Tony muttered.

“Oh yes. It was an impressive betrayal.”

“Wait.” The inventor’s brow furrowed. “Soul-based magics?”

“Dormammu armed some of his forces with the ability to damage, or outright remove, the souls of the righteous. Luckily, being Aesir, only so many of them really qualified as ‘righteous’ truly, but the problem with taking the righteous is that those who _were_ struck down by it, did their damage by virtue of _being the heroic ones_. Their loss led to such grief or even outright horror, as could overwhelm even their braver fellow warriors, after too much loss of the very best among them.”

Something in the back of Tony’s head went _ding_ quietly. “What happened to him, anyhow? The Dormammu guy?”

“He and Odin have an understanding.” Hel shrugged, finishing her drink. “His own powers are weakened outside his home dimension, even more so when he doesn’t have anyone on the other side to open the door for him, so his time and effectiveness can tend to be limited. I think that’s why he’s had so much trouble trying to conquer your little dimension, actually.”

 _Ding ding!_ “Has he?”

“Every time, he keeps getting banished back from whence he came by some Mystic you all have here. Oh, wait, no, he’s back home.” She smiled a little. “A recent acquisition, relatively speaking, but a fine one, for my collection. He passed on his title to a student of his, there was some big mess. Father laughed about it for weeks after, if rumor is to be believed; he and the former Sorcerer Supreme, the Mystic, had a bet of some sort going, apparently.”

Tony almost dropped his bottle of scotch as he went to refill her glass. “Pardon?”

“Hmm?” Hel shot him a questioning look. “What?”

“You’re saying this badass who Odin had to ask for help to defeat keeps getting knocked back on his ass by our Sorcerer Supreme?” Tony sighed.

“Well, to be fair, he started his attack on Asgard by using a corrupt mage and half the souls in what is now _my_ land of the dead, to open a portal for him, so that he was much closer to full strength when he attacked.”

 _DINGDINGDING_ ** _CRASH_**. And that was the sound of a full-blown idea exploding into existence in Tony Stark’s skull. “Oh _shit_. JARVIS? Tell Strange to get his happy ass up here, because he’s got some explaining to do.”

“Right away, sir.”

Hel tilted her head slightly at the humble, polished voice that came from the ceiling and the walls, but was the same volume as a normal human speaking voice. “Father did mention your bodiless servant. It’s an impressive work of magic.”

Tony blinked a bit, momentarily tripping over the places where Asgardian culture still had no lines drawn between the sort of magic Loki seemed to pull from thin air, and the sort of inventions created by one Tony Stark. Thinking about that too hard could give him a fairly awkward, raging theoretical physics boner, so he tended to conveniently forget about it most of the time, if only so he could get shit done in day to day life. “Magic. Right.”

“I take it your questions are sufficiently answered?”

“Yes, wonderfully, in fact,” Tony sighed. “Enough to give me a headache for the next week, I suspect.”

“Hmm. Now, may I see my father before I go?”

Tony stiffened. “What?”

“Mr. Stark,” JARVIS interrupted. “Dr. Strange is indisposed presently, in some sort of trance, through which he is exchanging information with Professor Charles Xavier. It will be some time before he is communicable in a less metaphysical fashion.”

The inventor sighed. “Of course. When he’s done, though, make sure he finds me as soon as he can poof.” He turned to Hel again. “Now what was it you just asked?”

“My father,” she reiterated.

“Yeah. Something about seeing him.”

“I know he is here.”

Tony decided not to ask how. His experiences with Hel so far, this being the third occasion he’d met her, had taught him that he usually didn’t want to know. “He’s also in a coma, really. After the whole ripped-out-soul thing.”

Hel rolled her eyes. “I’m aware, Tony Stark. Now take me to him, or I will rip off both of your arms before you can summon your armor, or your friends.”

“No wonder Natasha likes you,” Tony muttered.

“Does she?” Hel’s smile was suddenly lascivious.

For a long moment, Tony’s mind’s eye was filled with interesting images. “Uh.” Then he cleared his throat. “N-no comment.”

The goddess offered something alarmingly like a pout, then rose to her feet. “I can see about that another time, perhaps. For now, to my father. Lead on.”

Reluctantly, Tony did so. Once the elevator doors closed, he said blithely, “So I’m thinking of having a torrid affair with your dad.”

Nonplussed, Hel looked him over from head to toe appraisingly. “Somehow, I am unsurprised. You might even match him, given time, which would be a nice change of pace for one of his relationships, if it doesn’t get you both killed.”

Tony smirked at that. “I never said it’d be serious.”

“You didn’t have to.” She laughed a little when he shot her an uneasy look.

 

~~

 

Once down in the lab, Hel observed her father from behind a masked expression that looked alarmingly like Loki’s when he was feeling just annoyed enough to show contempt, but still mostly-closed, so that any other emotion remained buried behind an expression that appeared utterly devoid of amusement. She left Tony’s side to draw closer to the trickster, her dark hand touching his face for a moment.

“You idiot,” she muttered, leaning close to hiss in his ear. “I warned you, did I not? You are marked, and I’ll not suffer loss of your soul, for when that time comes you will serve your true purpose for once in your existence.” She inhaled sharply, then sighed, momentarily resting her forehead against Loki’s. “And it’s still too early for that. You still have a century or two to earn my forgiveness, after all, you insane bastard.”

Tony knew that a normal human wouldn’t be able to hear her words at this distance, given how quietly she spoke. He chose not to inform her that JARVIS’ systems were far more sensitive, and that he’d long ago made a habit of using them instead of his own, when in his own house. Still, he looked away almost awkwardly at her last statement.

“Now, let’s have a look,” Hel said, lifting her head again and staring down at him, scanning him head to foot, clearly seeing more than just his body and clothing. “It was a rough trip, wasn’t it.” She tisked, and rested a dark hand over her father’s sternum, and her paler one on his brow. Her eyes fell shut and the air around her seemed affected by a sudden haze, edged in purple-black smoke.

“Hey, now, what-” Tony started.

Then there was a sudden crackle, like the photonegative of a thunderclap, and almost as deafening. Tony’s ears were left ringing loudly but he could still hear fine through less fleshy ones.

“The fuck did you just do?” Tony snapped.

“I’m goddess of death and the underworld, Anthony Stark. Souls and the condition thereof are a specialty of mine. Now wake up, you complete ass,” she snapped, slapping Loki hard on the chest, enough to make the trickster’s breath audibly leave his lungs a bit too abruptly, forcing him to sit up a bit.

“Your care and affection warms the cockles of my heart, as always, dear Hel,” Loki wheezed, opening one eye. “I had the issue in hand.”

“I’m certain you did.” She patted him on the head rather condescendingly. “Mother sends her best, by the way.”

The trickster snorted. “I doubt it.”

“She’s engaged, actually.”

Loki blinked, but was more mildly surprised than at all disturbed or hurt. “Oh.”

“So yes, she actually did.” Hel folded her arms over her chest and lifted her chin slightly. “She truly is well, and wishes the same to you.”

Loki sat up slowly. “If you get the opportunity, please offer her my sincere congratulations.”

“Hmm. Sneaky. If I suggest you were actually sincere, she might even believe it.”

“I am,” Loki said, his voice even and only a little sharp.

Hel tilted her head a bit to one side again, her lips tugging into a half-smirk. “I believe you. Now keep your soul intact and _with_ you, or I’ll confiscate it myself. It has duties as important as mine, but it’s less clear as to whether or not _you_ do.”

“I’m aware,” the trickster growled. He reached out and touched the back of her neck, gently pulling her close enough their foreheads met. “I do thank you.”

Trying not to lean into the touch, Hel gave an irritable huff and let him, but only for a couple of seconds before shrugging him off. “In two moon’s time, I expect you to finalize our post-war reparations agreements, princeling.”

Loki half-smiled a bit self-deprecatingly. “Presuming I remain alive with soul intact, I will be there.”

Hel nodded sharply, and vanished in a cloud of dark purple smoke.

Tony cleared his throat. “Well. That was touching.” He couldn’t help but smile a bit, though. The pair of them were a bit terrifyingly alike, sometimes, but where Loki was clearly an independent trickster, Hel was a _queen_ and a ruler, and you could tell just by a glance her way. She thrived on her responsibilities and defending what was hers. Loki, by contrast was... simply _Loki_. He was more than a king; he was a force of nature, for worse or better. No kingship could contain him, and summarily he could never really hold a kingship––not for long, in any case, as his track record proved.

The trickster shot a glare his way, then glanced down at himself and frowned. He waved a hand with a spell roughly equivalent to a long shower and a fresh set of clothes: similar riding trousers, same boots though they appeared more polished, and his shirt was the same style, but of a darker green and finer fabric.

“Seriously, your daughter is kind of both terrifying and awe-inspiring. It’s unfair that she’s also smart enough to make me uneasy and gorgeous enough that Natasha of all people can’t stop staring when she’s in the same room.”

The trickster snorted a laugh at that and slid from the bed he’d spent the past week in, dusting himself off. His smile held a bit of pride in it however. “Yes, I do look forward to the day she no longer wishes to stab me on sight.”

“You’d deserve it,” Tony pointed out.

“True enough.” Loki shrugged it off. “I deserve far worse, but there are none in the universe capable of making me repay that debt, even were I to ask it of them: not in any way that would matter. As such, I do as I please.”

“Yeah, large-scale war-crimes can be that way.”

“And yet, it does not bother you.” Loki strode closer to him, stopping very close indeed. “Not as it probably should, according to conventional human morality, these days.”

“You’re not the only one with a debt that can never be repaid,” Tony said blithely. “Like you, most of my victims who most deserve an apology and some sort of recompense, are dead. And they’re the only ones who would be able to forgive me. So I don’t care much about forgiveness and making amends. I’d go crazy if I did.”

“What makes you think that you haven’t?”

Tony grinned. “I’m a connoisseur of my own degrees of insanity. This is a level of it I can handle.” _So far_ , he didn’t add.

“You do not seek forgiveness, you do not seek to make amends, yet you risk your life and those of others daily, seemingly with the goal of improving your world,” Loki mused, circling him once, eyeing him head to foot. “Why?”

“Because I’ve still got people who haven’t betrayed me yet,” Tony countered.

Loki stilled, his eyes narrowing as he held the inventor’s gaze.

Tony continued regardless, “and I’m inclined to protect them from the ones who have, and the ones who will attack because I have something they want and they know the people I give a shit about are easier to target than I am, in most cases.” He then added, as a carefree afterthought, “Plus, all the less weaponized inventions are a good creative outlet, and as far as hobbies go, building a brighter future for all mankind is the most harmless one I’ve got left. Might as well give it all I’ve got.”

The trickster appeared thoughtful, at that. “I once sacrificed a great deal for my kin, very frequently. It did not prevent their betrayal, in the end.”

“Family can be like that; you’re stuck with them, no choice given. That’s why the family I’ve got around me these days is invitation-only. No one is in my family anymore who doesn’t want to be.”

“Yes.” Loki looked thoughtfully over his shoulder, back toward where Hel had been, then let his gaze drift up and around the lab thoughtfully. “Not a bad idea.” His expression was a sort of mask Tony had only seen once or twice: one that meant something got through to something deep under the surface that he didn’t reject outright as a threat like most, but was instead willing to tentatively accept, and give careful consideration to.

It made something in Tony’s chest give an uncomfortably sympathetic twinge and he coughed. “Anyway. So. Tell me about Dormammu. Is it possible he _is_ the villain we’re looking for, or did Hel pull some sort of Jedi mind trick on me?”

Loki’s gaze fixed on him quickly again, his expression becoming a snarl. “What did you just say?”

Tony grinned. “I’m right aren’t I? It’s him.”

A rapid-fire series of micro-expressions crossed Loki’s face. “You’re brilliant,” he said, low and cool and distant. “And correct. Souls of mages and telepaths––all he would need for a servant to open the door for him.”

“Yep.”

“How many so far?”

“Twenty that we can confirm, but we’re tracking cases of people who’ve slipped into comas unexpectedly, and there’s several likely-sounding cases there, too.”

Loki swore. “Given that you seem to know personally several victims, and they are significantly powerful, he would need less than fifty collected by his servant. We need to find who is doing this for him, and what he has offered them in return.”

Tony smirked a little, appreciative of how much importance Loki attached to motives as well as identity. “You feel like being helpful on that front?”

“For now,” Loki said, aloof as a feline.

The inventor sidled closer, until they were pressed together with few gaps from sternum to thigh, and Tony’s hands settled on either side of the tall god’s waist. “Your intelligence is a turn-on. I want you to know this.” Because, he reasoned, Strange would be busy for a while anyway. Surely. They had a bit of time, urgent revelations aside.

With a sound in his throat, the trickster gripped Tony’s hips firmly and breathed him in. “I could say much the same for you.”

“JARVIS? When Strange is out of his goddamn trance, tell him there’s an Avengers meeting in about thirty minutes. Then tell the Avengers, too.” _That should be a reasonable time buffer for at least a quickie with the god of lies and mischief, right?_

“He’s in a trance?”

“Chatting up a distant telepath.”

“Xavier?”

“How well do you know everyone on this planet, anyhow?”  
“People can be infinitely useful. I make a point of learning about the more interesting ones, as resources.” His head lowered a little, moving his lips closer to Tony’s. “Unless they prove outright fascinating.”

“Got a track record of those?”

“Only one mortal so far.”

Tony snorted. “Flattering. How many horses?”

“Shut up,” Loki snapped, just before capturing the inventor’s mouth with his own.

For his part, Tony was fine with this; although he was practical enough to silently key in a lockdown command to keep any interruptions at bay. Well, it might keep most possible interruptions at bay. Being an Avenger, in Avenger’s Tower, he knew all too well the lengths some catastrophes and “friends” would go to, just to get his attention.

To his surprise, Loki gave a low hum, and pulled back just enough to inquire, lips still touching, “Locking me in, are you?”

“Locking your brother and the others out. You could tell?” Then he stilled as something hummed through the whole room: a low energy-signature, expanding outward from Loki’s feet like a fractal to cover the walls. “What did you just do?”

“Same, roughly speaking.”

“And you let me record it.”

“I’m curious what you may make of it.”

Tony made a low noise in his throat and pulled the god back down sharply, and the sound that Loki made into his mouth was amusement and satisfaction, with an edge of something hungrier. Not half so distracted by maintaining coherency in a dream-like environment of his own making, Tony focused entirely on Loki: a worthy puzzle, and one he was intent upon cracking. His hands drifted over and under the trickster’s clothing, tugging open buckles and plucking expertly at laces that reminded him fondly of when he was dating a broadway actress who appreciated his knack for getting her in and out of corsets in record time: engineering lessons put to practical use; and yet, he wasn’t in any hurry here. He took his time, fingers light but sure, until he found a spot that got a bit of a reaction, and found a way to multiply that reaction at least tenfold. All the while, Loki kissed him, luxuriant and teasing, though by the time the god’s shirt was gone and his trousers were open, Loki was far from unaffected by the inventor’s ministrations.

Tony tugged off his own shirt, breaking away from the trickster’s mouth briefly, only to dive right back in again. Then he pushed Loki backward a few steps, until he had the god of mischief pinned between himself and a heavy steel worktable. Loki broke the kiss with a faint gasp. Taking the opportunity to lick at the pale column of the trickster’s throat, Tony murmured, “You’ve been thinking about this, haven’t you?”

Loki’s lips, now curving with a hint of humor, were parted, red and a little swollen, as he caught his breath a bit. “Perhaps.” He ran his nails down Tony’s back, scratching just hard and swiftly enough that they didn’t start to sting until the moment he stopped.

“Been longer for you than it was for me, at a guess––since you’ve been pinned down and given a thorough fucking?”

The trickster’s hands drifted up and down his back, along his spine, then paused to slide under the waistband of his jeans and grip his ass firmly. “Mayhap so.” He used that firm grip for leverage as he rolled their hips together sinuously, making them both groan. “I make a habit of requiring some persuasion. Few can persuade someone of my sort, you see.”

“A silver-tongued liar, yeah, I read your wikipedia page,” Tony muttered, biting at a spot just below Loki’s pulse-point that he’d discovered earlier, and enjoying the shiver that the god of mischief couldn’t quite repress in response.

“A greater pack of lies than even I could have concocted myself, intermixed with old rumors,” Loki shot back, but his voice was a little more ragged, especially as Tony’s hand down the front of the trickster’s pants began stroking: slow and maddening.

“Your lies have to pass for reality, though. Artfully crafted, aren’t they, every one,” Tony purred, pushing the taller man’s pants down further, freeing Loki’s erection to better wrap his hand around it. Not quite gentle, but unhurried, he got in a bit of exploration, there.

“Flattery,” Loki said, but his eyes fluttered shut.

“Look at me.”

Eyelids lifting halfway, the trickster offered a smirk. “Want me to see your handiwork?”

“You’re an appreciative audience. I like it,” Tony countered, and knelt. The slow, raggedly hissing breath that stuttered from between Loki’s clenched teeth shortly thereafter, as the inventor’s mouth wrapped around the head of his cock, was quite gratifying. Curling his tongue, tip pressing against the slit, Tony gave a low moan in his throat at the taste and the feel of it: heat and musk, salt and not-off-putting bitterness. He heard a more ragged, breathless sound from Loki, as the god’s long fingers tangled in his hair, gripping just shy of painfully, but not steering him, instead letting him drive. Tony rewarded him by recalling his college days and the mastery of his gag reflex learned therein, and took Loki in down to the base. The surprised, choked-off gasp from the silver-tongued god of lies was more than worth the effort, so Tony pulled back up slowly, cheeks hollowing, and did it again, and again, in a slow, almost tortuous rhythm.

If he also happened to have lube in his pocket, well: force of habit can be a surprisingly useful thing. It made it much easier, once Loki’s hips were shifting under his hand with the effort of not thrusting more forcefully into his mouth, to catch the trickster a little off-guard. One slick finger finding his entrance and circling it, Tony glanced up and met Loki’s stare with his own. The sight almost made him forget what he was doing: Loki flushed with arousal, green eyes wide and dark, watching him with an intensity bordering on desperation, and panting quietly through parted lips, with small beads of sweat standing out on his brow.

Tony raised his eyebrows in silent question, pausing to lick at the head again almost thoughtfully as his finger circled and circled again, slow and maddening.

Seemingly a bit surprised, the trickster nodded, rolling his hips up both to get more of that mouth, and to provide easier access. “Don’t you dare stop,” he hissed.

Being not a fool, Tony didn’t have to be told twice. He released Loki only briefly to respond, “I wouldn’t dream of it.” Then he smirked and sucked Loki back down before the low muttering curses could escalate, causing them to instead break off mid-syllable as he slid two slick fingers into Loki’s opening. The inventor made a sound in his throat, because Loki felt unfairly hot and tight around him, and the thought of how that would feel soon enough around his cock made him nearly ache. The noise garnered a jerk of Loki’s hips, seemingly involuntary, shaking him out of his thoughts and bringing his focus back to the trickster, and his goal of getting a god to beg.

So he put his fingers to good use, content to show off that Loki wasn’t the only one with truly talented hands. Between that, and his mouth, and less than ten minutes, he had the god of lies writhing for him and breathing hard. He was talking, but for better or worse, he seemed to have slipped out of Allspeak and so whatever praises or epithets Loki might be uttering, all Tony could quite make of them was some very nordic-sounding syllables and a lot of encouragement. When the tone took on a certain tenor Tony had been holding out for, he pulled his mouth away and rose to his feet again, pressing Loki’s now-plaint body back against the work table. His fingers didn’t stop, but with the absence of Tony’s mouth, the trickster pushed back a bit more urgently against them.

“I’d like you to tell me what you want, Loki.”

The trickster, once his fever-bright eyes fluttered open, glared at him a bit, and seized hold of his wrist.

Obediently, Tony stilled and removed his hand, smirking at the way Loki’s teeth dragged across his lower lip and he audibly stifled a noise. Then the inventor’s breath caught in his throat as Loki perched on the edge of the table, leaning back on his elbows, and wrapped both indecently long legs around his waist, their grip pulling Tony in closer. The trickster pulled Tony down with one hand on the back of his neck, licked at his mouth hotly and rasped, “I want you to fuck me, Tony Stark. And I recommend that you do so. Right. Now.”

Tony shuddered, because while it wasn’t exactly a helpless plea, it still went straight to his cock and he realized his own resistance wasn’t going to last in the face of Loki saying things like that. “You are just unfairly hot,” he groaned.

“Playing fair is dull,” Loki countered, and licked at his mouth again, teasingly delving a bit deeper for more of a taste of him, then pulled back. “Now fuck me.”

“Fuckyes,” Tony groaned, lining himself up with one hand, the other gripping Loki’s waist just above the hip. He tugged the god closer as he slid inside, not slowly, to the hilt, and reflected that this was quite possibly one of the best bad ideas he’d ever had. He remained still as much to steel himself as to let Loki adjust. He then realized that Loki had his head thrown back, throat bared, and took swift advantage, leaning in to drag his teeth across that expanse of unmarked skin.

Arching against the inventor, Loki made an untranslatable sound full of want, and rolled his hips bringing Tony deeper and making the mortal moan against his throat. “Move, Tony.”

Tony moved, pulling back only to thrust back in deep as he could, aiming for the spot his fingers had gotten so well-acquainted with recently, grinning viciously when a tremor ran up through Loki’s entire body as he found it. So, of course, he did it again, hands hard on the trickster’s hips as he applied all of his focus to that spot, and to making Loki fall apart under him. “Goddamn, you’re gorgeous.”

In response, Loki half-smiled and rolled his hips down to meet Tony’s next thrust, tightening deliberately and making the mortal break rhythm for a moment. “Come now, Tony,” he panted. “Don’t hold back on me.”

“You neither,” Tony shot back. “Touch yourself for me.”

With a short-lived smirk, Loki cooperated, long fingers curling around himself, beginning to pull in time with their thrusts.

Then the inventor leaned in closer, changing the angle just so, and hissing, “And remember how my mouth felt on you. If I could, I’d suck you too while I was at this, and swallow you down as you break for me.”

A shocked, broken sound escaped Loki’s throat, his body tight and tense as the first stirrings of orgasm threatened. He was back to cursing in a dead language, his hips moving with a bit less coordination.

Tony managed to fuck him through it, but just barely, before the tightness, the heat, and the sounds Loki made as he came became too much, and sent him hurtling over the edge too, leaving them tangled together, held up primarily by the worktable, especially as Tony slowly leaned in until his forehead rested on Loki’s clavicle, his forearms on either side of the trickster’s ribcage, as he gingerly pulled out and tried to catch his breath.

 _Bad decision-making or no_ , he decided, _the sex is proving to be fantastic_.

It wasn’t until Loki laughed at him, almost giggled really, that Tony realized he’d said that out loud.

“Are you seriously giggling?”

“I think it merited, if I am,” Loki shot back, then sniggered again.

“You can’t say I’m wrong.”

“Mmm,” Loki rumbled, low and sultry. “I’m not inclined to lie about it presently, so I’ll refrain from saying such a thing, yes.”

“I knew it.”

“I should hope so. Your title of ‘genius’ would need to be revoked otherwise.” He then waved a hand idly, and the previously getting-sticky sources of moist discomfort vanished entirely.

“That’s ridiculously convenient.”

“Magic has perks of a non-weaponizable sort, on occasion.”

“I keep saying the same thing about the arc reactor, but nooo, everyone want weapons, all the time.”

Loki snorted quietly, and Tony could feel it against his hair, which the trickster began absent-mindedly running his fingers through. “You’re not surprised.”

“I’m not. Just generally annoyed, a bit.” His thumbs traced Loki’s ribs idly. “Are we actually cuddling?”

“I’m disinclined to put clothing back on until I must,” Loki muttered. “If I’m not mistaken, you’re of a similar mind.”

Tony smiled, letting the trickster feel it by making sure his lips brushed against pale skin. “You have a point.” He relaxed a little further, and nudged his head up a bit, rubbing against Loki’s hand.

The trickster fell quiet then, but Tony could feel him watching, and eventually tilted his head up to meet the god’s stare. Loki looked the more relaxed than the inventor could ever recall seeing before, with mild curiosity and satisfaction making his almost eternally calculative expression less cold.

“You read me disconcertingly well,” Loki murmured eventually.

Tony smiled slow and wicked, but there was a hint of something milder, more like genuine fondness, quietly peering out from behind it. “Same to you, Loki, and you know it.”

“I’m a god.”

“And I’m a genius. I am the best and brightest, down here.” He scooted one elbow up almost to Loki’s armpit, and shifted his weight a little, so he could rest his chin on his hand. “It’s my _job_ to make gods nervous, because I want what all of you have got and I can figure out how to get it, given a bit of time.”

Something dangerous and wary flickered in Loki’s expression, but there was want in it, too. “Yes, I can see that.”

“I don’t make you really _nervous_ though.”

“ _Trickster_ god,” Loki riposted. “I’ve been making the rest of the gods nervous for centuries, for much the same reasons.”

Tony felt a peculiar prickling sensation down his spine at that, and his tongue darted out quickly to wet his lips. “I know. I like that about you.”

Loki pulled him up and a bit closer again, then, and brought their lips back into contact, slow and unhurried.

“Mr. Stark, Mr. Lie-smith, if I may,” JARVIS said suddenly.

Loki glared ceiling-ward.

Tony huffed. “Interruption, I’m guessing? Not just you.”

“It would seem that Dr. Strange was inclined to have the meeting sooner, rather than later, and has grown increasingly persistent in his inquiries as to your whereabouts. Natasha has suggested a trip down here for everyone gathered.”

“That woman is way too sharp for my own good,” Tony muttered.

“She has excellent taste, however.”

“You just say that because she has a crush on your daughter.”

Loki shrugged, laying back lazily on the table, eyes drifting shut.

“I should mention that I’m not sure which direction I flung your pants.”

Lazily, the trickster raised one hand, gesturing a bit and muttering a spell.

Tony found himself, and Loki, both fully dressed all of a sudden. “I need to learn more about magic,” he said, with sudden grave determination.

Loki hummed noncommittally, but the inventor hadn’t missed the way his head had cocked a bit just before that: like a cat that’s heard a mouse nearby.

Pressing close again, until Loki’s face was almost, but not quite, out of focus, and said, “I wonder where I might find an expert on magic around here.”

“Hmm. Well, given I’ve decided to pursue you, I might be able to explain a few basic concepts that you might be missing.”

The inventor shivered a little. “Okay, that was a direct attempt to distract me.”

“Is it working?” Loki raised an eyebrow, still not even opening his eyes.

Tony’s eyes narrowed. “A bit. Fine, yes. What sort of pursuit?” He stilled when one of Loki’s hands drifted up under his t-shirt to slowly trace the edge of the arc reactor where metal met skin. It sent a shiver up through him that was more thrilling than it should be, given how threatening the gesture could seem, if he let it.

Loki’s eyes fell open. “I mean that I would not be uninterested in a sort of partnership.”

“You want us to go steady?” Tony sounded caught between warning and amused. Wariness crept into his expression, to match the return of one of the trickster’s masks now fallen back into place.

“I want _you_ ,” Loki corrected, low and dangerous. His lips curved with a hint of amusement, with an edge of mockery that could easily turn into a lie of indifference if needed, to protect himself. “You’ve encouraged the casual desires of a mad god, but are you equally fearless when the desire is less casual?”

“It was ever casual? Funny, I thought we both firmly reached out and blurred that enemy/lover line, with an understanding that this was going to be a glorious catastrophe since I’m already under your skin as much as you’ve gotten under mine, because you’re a brilliant conniving bastard, and I’m an astonishingly clever and gifted one.” He raised an eyebrow, starting to smile a little more sincerely, and challengingly. “Why wouldn’t I be inclined to catch you? It’d be better than stealing fire, and even more likely to get me burned. Now, I won’t run if you won’t.”

Loki considered, masked as before. “Perhaps.”

Tony reached out, without moving a muscle, and disengaged lockdown procedures before the others could run into them. He felt the crackle and release of Loki’s own wards, sending the data straight from the scanners into his own memory, suddenly able to see it a bit more clearly. “What was that made of? It’s not anything like a shield.”

“It’s a field which causes distraction to any who approach it. Any not prepared for it, or trained in recognizing it, find themselves reaching a doorway, only to suddenly recall something else very important they have to do, in the opposite direction,” Loki explained, folding his hands behind his head.

The inventor stared almost through him for a few moments. “Not quite psychic. Messier than that, lower energy, able to stretch better...”

“It’s on a more empathic wavelength, yes.”

“Now you’re almost speaking my language.”

Loki smirked. “I already am, actually. Just a different field than you’re used to, with different, oh what’s the term–– _jargon_?”

Tony hummed, low and interested, then offered a self-deprecating smile and slowly pushed himself upright, back onto his feet. “I am regretting the lifting of lockdown already,” he muttered.

The trickster stretched like a cat in a sunbeam, and slid gracefully off the table. Along with his newer shirt, he also had on a vest and slightly more formal trousers to match, in a slightly darker leather theme with a bit more metal on the sides: closer to what he usually wore under his armor and long outer coat. “How long until they arrive, do you think?”

“Oh... I’d say, thirty seconds?”

Loki appeared amused, and ran a hand through his hair. Only magic could account for how that single stroke turned his slightly wild just-had-sex hair back into its usual, more tame style. He looked Tony over and smirked.

“I don’t have hair magic.”

“Shall I?” The trickster’s smile was wide and harmless-looking.

It made Tony suddenly very wary. He recalled a number of pranks Thor had recounted to them on various nights wherein he’d returned from a visit to Asgard with a gift of mead in no small quantity. The number of times Thor’s locks, or someone else’s, had fallen victim to Loki’s mischief, had been too many for comfort. “I’ve heard about you and hair-pranks.”

“I could always do it anyway.”

Tony considered his options, and settled for changing the subject. “They don’t know you’re awake, incidentally. I didn’t warn them at all, since I didn’t realize Hel planned to just heal you and then beat you up until you got out of bed.”

“Now who’s attempting to distract?”

“Is it working?” Tony began surreptitiously smoothing down his hair, using his reflection from one of the nearby unlit touch-screen panels.

Loki turned to look toward the door suddenly, already aware of the others approaching. “No, but your teammates themselves will certainly serve the same purpose.”

Tony dropped his hands just as the door opened. His hair looked only a little more mussed than usual; it could pass for his usual ‘I’ve been in my lab working and have no fucks left to give’ hair at a glance.

Natasha strolled in first, taking in Loki where he leaned his hip against the work table, to Tony standing a bit closer than most Avengers would stand to an arch-nemesis, but Tony tended to ignore other people’s ideas about personal space on a regular basis anyway. Behind her was Dr. Strange, followed shortly by Thor. As soon as that blond head was in range, Tony could sense Loki tensing like a spring, ready to lash out.

Thor’s eyes flashed with fondness and relief, but his expression turned solemn shortly after and he regarded his brother carefully, restraining his initial joyous reaction to seeing Loki well and fully conscious again, and maintaining a wary composure. Scanning the other god head to foot quickly, he offered a nod of greeting. “Loki.”

Suspicious, and a little bemused, Loki nodded. “Thor.”

“When did _you_ wake up?” Natasha asked.

From the corridor, Barton shouted, “He’s awake?!”

T’Challa, in the doorway, called back, “Yes, he’s awake.”

Steve entered then, along with Bruce and Clint.

Tony was amused a bit at how quickly Loki’s focus riveted on Bruce Banner, making a swift but thorough examination of him before his gaze darted about quickly to re-establish the positions of the room’s nearest exits.

“He won’t bite,” Tony muttered under his breath.

Loki snorted. “Of course not. I have you for that,” he countered, just as quietly.

Steve looked moderately worried, and cleared his throat. “Do I want to know what you two are muttering about?”

“We’re mocking you,” Loki deadpanned.

“He’s mocking you,” Tony corrected.

“Tony is, I believe, what you mortals refer to as an ‘enabler’ here.”

Natasha snorted a laugh despite herself, Barton looked unwillingly amused, Steve frowned, Thor and T’Challa exchanged mildly bemused looks, and Bruce shook his head at all of them.

Strange was the one who responded, “Well, clearly.”

“Good to meet you in corporeal form, Dr. Strange,” Loki offered, with a deceptively charming smile. “I do hope your wits are more about you, here.”

Idly, Tony recalled a story from the eddas (or, as Loki liked to call them, ‘the watered-down and nonsensical drivel of a bygone mortal era, carelessly mistranslated and all’) about Loki insulting every single person of importance at a banquet. He reflected that the reality was just a bit classier about content and delivery, compared to the myth.

The sorcerer looked decidedly unamused. “And I hope your civility is rather more about _you_ , trickster.”

“My civilization is older than your planet,” Loki countered.

“Which one?” Strange asked lightly.

The trickster’s eyes narrowed into slits.

“Brother,” Thor warned quietly.

“Hardly,” Loki snapped, his rage fixing on a more familiar focal point, but instead of the condescending pity and meaningless forgiveness, he found Thor held his gaze with a steely one of his own, urging caution, reminding him... reminding him of numerous times he’d warned Thor about letting his pride and temper steer him. Taking a slow, deep breath, Loki returned his attention to Strange. “Either, but only one of them has ever bothered to claim me, the younger of the two, and it _still_ predates earth. If you truly _must_ know.”

Tony shot Thor a surprised look.

The thunderer folded his arms across his chest, frowning slightly. _I was listening._

Still somewhat in shock at the change in Thor’s demeanor toward his brother––from passionate to stoic––Tony became aware of Loki watching him, and Thor, and making a couple of connections. He had no idea what the trickster would make of it, but––well, he’d overheard, earlier. There wasn’t much to misinterpret, after all that mes. Tony risked a glance Loki’s way.

The trickster’s best expressionless mask was back in place, but he kept darting the occasional bemused look at Thor.

“If the two mages are done measuring their dicks,” Clint called, thoroughly shattering the tense silence by inspiring a more impersonally awkward one, “Tony knows something about who we’re after.”

“Yeah, I do. Loki agrees with me on it, actually.”

The trickster nodded, and glared at Strange pointedly. For his part, the sorcerer looked a bit startled.

“So, Strangelove. What’s Dormammu’s deal?”

Strange paled considerably. “Oh god.”

“Dormammu is something other than a god, actually,” Loki drawled. “Aside from your arch-nemesis, of course. Funny you didn’t think of him before.” He sounded outright accusatory.

“He’s sworn to make no further incursions in this dimension,” Strange snapped.

“It’s hardly an incursion if he’s _invited_ by an ally,” the trickster shot back. “He’s done it before, as you _should_ have learned from any proper extra-planar research. You might have mentioned his name to any worthy mage in Asgard, Vanaheim, Alfheim, or Dvergarheim, and heard the tale.”

“Peace, Loki. He has not so many years as you,” Thor rumbled.

“All the better reason to instill the lesson now,” Loki murmured. “This should have been identifiable far sooner.”

“And so who is his ally? Who invites him?” Strange demanded.

“That part, we don’t really know,” Tony admitted freely. He added, to Loki, “And to be fair, you didn’t work it out either until I brought it up.”

“How did you know of it?” Thor asked, sincerely curious.

Tony shrugged. “Conversation with Hel. We went off on a few tangents––and lucky thing that we did.”

“She must be fond of you,” Loki mused. “Not to the extent she may favor the lovely Natasha, but given she’s never shown any interest in males of any species, I wouldn’t let that harm your pride.”

The inventor shot Loki a look, managing by some miracle not to snigger, even as Natasha seemed to be focused on Loki with practiced indifference of a particularly icy focus that the rest of the Avengers weren’t used to seeing without half of her face hidden behind a sniper rifle and scope.

Loki studiously did not meet his stare, which only made it worse, because there was a tilt to his smirk––mocking, playful, definitely a bit off-kilter, but in a way that suited the trickster well enough––that made Tony want to do things to that mouth.

“Most people don’t offer the vulnerabilities of their own family,” Natasha said.

“My dear lady, if I considered you a genuine threat to my daughter––if I thought you might harm her or try to distance her from me more than my own actions already have––you would not be alive,” Loki said cheerfully, turning up the intensity of both brightness and psychopathy in his grin until he seemed to show very nearly all of his teeth. “Keep that in mind.”

 _That really shouldn’t be a turn-on_ , Tony mused. _Oh, but it is._

Natasha looked outright suspiciously thoughtful at that. “Interesting, given that last time I saw her, she was trying to kill you.”

“Time is a curious thing. I have a great deal of it, as you do, Agent Romanov,” Loki said, with a seemingly careless shrug. “One thing it will not change, one fixed thing, is that she will always be my daughter.” Loki’s mockery died, just for a brief instant, with chilling results, showing something ferocious and glacial and deeply cunning: a true glimpse behind his mask, and not a pretty one. Then it was gone. “I value her as such.”

Clint whistled. “Well, that was deep. And I now have some interesting mental images to follow up on later. Back to business: Loki, you’re an ass and we can’t trust you, so why are you not in cuffs?”

“Like these?” Loki let the Asgardian manacles dangle from one finger, after summoning them from thin air. He shook his head, tisking. “Oh, yes, because locking me up is always terribly effective.” After tossing them forward to land near Clint’s and Steve’s feet, the trickster folded his arms over his chest. “I don’t need your trust. I need your intelligence, if some of you can manage it. It is in my best interest to track down the person responsible for my recent incapacitation so that I might spent a few days showing them a few of the nastier tricks your ancestors used to punish each other with, in what’s now Scandinavia. Humanity is nothing if not creative in regards to torture. Have you ever heard of the Blood Eagle?”

“Of course you know about that,” Tony muttered.

“I was the one who had to explain it to Odin after I’d found out about the practice. We stopped visiting earth not long after that––or, rather, after the incident wherein he and I found out about certain funeral ritual for chiefs of their tribe, in regards to their slaves,” Loki mused. “I would like to think your species has come a long way, but really, you’ve only gotten better at hiding the really bloodthirsty people in plain sight.”

“You committed genocide,” Bruce said quietly.

Loki shrugged. “I’m a frost giant.”

“Most of them kill rather more honorably,” Thor said quietly.

At that, Loki hesitated, shooting Thor a strange look.

“Before this turns into anything explosive,” Natasha interrupted, “I’d like to remind everyone that we have another problem a bit more important.

“The soul-thief,” T’Challa concurred.

“Then I need to pay a visit to the Baxter building,” Loki said simply. “Give me a few hours with some of the victims and any evidence collected from where they were attacked, and I shall get a better idea of just what sort of monster I can look forward to eviscerating so very soon.”

The Avengers exchanged glances. Strange just continued to glare right at Loki, shaking his head slowly. His expression changed to disgusted resignation when a murmur of reluctant agreement rose from the other collected heroes.

 _This_ , Tony thought, _will be fun._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title: back to Hamlet quotes. "...but that dread of something after death, that undiscovered country from whose bourne, no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of."
> 
> ...I may have memorized that soliloquy recently for nostalgic reasons.


End file.
